Syrian Arab Republic

Tishreen University

Faculty of Arts

English Department

Thomas Hardy:

Between the Scylla of the Genes and the Charybdis of the Memes

In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master in Arts

By:

Rawa Zrekah

Supervised by:

Dr. Ahmad Al-Issa

Summer 2018

Dedication

I dedicate this work to those who believed in me:

My great Father

My loving Mother

My patient Husband

My supporting Sisters and Brothers

And to your pure soul… My unforgettable Meray.

With My Love

Acknowledgements

Although I was not the perfect student, you were the perfect supervisor.

Thanks for your invaluable moral support.

I am also grateful to all my doctors at the English Department, Tishreen

University especially Dr. Abeer Zahra and Dr. Susie Gharib. Their reading of the

dissertation is a rebirth of it.

Thomas Hardy: Between the Scylla of the Genes and the

Charybdis of the Memes

Abstract ………………………………………………….1

I. Introduction

A. Merciless Memes ………………………………………. 2

B. The Literature of Memes ……………………………… 9

C. “Steel Traps” ………………………………………….. 19

II. Jude the Obscure

A. The Unbreakable Bubble ……………………………… 24

B. Survival of the Submissive ……………………………. 29

C. Social-Construction and Self-Destruction ………….. 40

D. Membots: Agents of Conformity ……………………. 49

E. Mesmerized Memoids …………………………………. 65

F. Negating the Power of Negation …………………….. 87

III. Conclusion

“Individuality”: A Trojan Horse ………………………... 111

Works Cited ……………………………………………...... 115 Zrekah

Abstract

Between what the characters of Thomas Hardy think they know and what they do not know lies their inevitable tragedy. They strongly believe that they are men and women. They do not know that they are nothing but membots and memoids. They think that they run their own lives but they do not realize that they are lifeless. The stronger the illusion, the stronger the confusion. Individuality is an illusion and freedom is an illusion to the extent that identity itself becomes a delusion. At the very end, characters discover that they are puppets not persons, and pawns not people.

Either they bow or they perish. It is not only genes; it is memes. It is not just heredity; it is society. It is not simply biology; it is ideology. It is not exclusively in the blood; it is in the head. The snare, as Hardy says, is ―in the air‖ (Hardy, 1999, 91). Memes are the social units that circulate and transform people into membots. These membots may metamorphose later into sacrificial memoids. The world consists of memplexes and the atmosphere is nothing but an ideosphere. Memes reinforce social homogeneity and demolish individual heterogeneity. The dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter

One is the introduction. It presents the theory of Memetics. It explains its basics and defines its major terms. Chapter Two discusses Jude the Obscure. It is divided into six parts for six different issues. This chapter demonstrates that characters do not possess ideas. Ideas possess characters. The human tragedy is human hauntology. Arabella is a membot. Sue is a memoid and Jude is both. Chapter Three is the conclusion. It displays that society is a blackhole, from which nothing can escape, not even light

(Mambrol, 2017). The aim of the dissertation is to reread Jude from the new perspective of Memetics. ―To meme or not to meme,‖ as Elizabeth Penning says, ―that is the question‖ (2018).

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Zrekah I. Introduction:

A. Merciless Memes

In the beginning was the Meme. Memes and co-memes are ubiquitous units boasting a potent viral nature. They hover within the sphere of a cultural system.

They form a unified mass of memeplexes controlling and directing the course of a particular social construction. Burdened by the prevailing memes, humans are entrapped as meme-vehicles. Their vocation is to maintain, propagate, transmit, receive, accept and act upon uncountable sets of memes, called memeplexes. Under memetic hegemony, being a proper ―member‖ in society requires being a positive meme-bearer. ―[H]umans,‖ stresses Susan Blackmore, the memetic theorist, in her

The Meme Machine (1999), ―because of [their] powers of imitation, have become just the physical ‗hosts‘ needed for the memes to get around‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 8).

Being so overwhelming, meme-infection is inescapable and ―memeticization‖ is unstoppable (my term).

Although coined in Richard Dawkins‘ The Selfish Gene (1976), the ―meme‖ has progressively developed a charisma of its own. ―[T]unes, ideas, catch-phrases,‖ and

―clothes fashions‖ are some of Dawkins‘ examples of memes (Dawkins, 1989, 192).

These contagious ―units of cultural transmission,‖ as Blackmore identifies them in her introduction to ―Imitation and the Definition of a Meme‖ (1998), manage their continuous spread travelling from mind to mind mainly by means of imitation and copying (Blackmore, 1998). Blackmore re-stresses the definition of memes as

―[b]ehaviors and ideas copied from person to person by imitation‖ (Blackmore, 2000, 64).

Dawkins continues explaining that, ―[t]he medium of transmission is human influence of various kinds, the spoken and written word, personal example and so on‖ (198). Using different terms, Glenn Grant defines a meme, in his ―Memetic

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Zrekah Lexicon‖ (1990), as ―a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern‖ (Grant, 1990). They dynamically circulate within a cultural structure.

Memes are imperceptible entities that materialize only in the behavior of a particular person within his/her environment. Only through this substantiation, memeticization is fully observed and adequately examined. Memes evolve and progress with regard to the general social mode to which they hugely contribute.

Throughout their dissemination, memes seek to achieve conformity in every community. Social construction is based on a process of stereotype construction and monotype destruction. The mass of memes forms a kind of cultural pattern upon which the concept of ―cultural heredity‖ is based.

Memes are autonomous units. Still, they live in symbiosis with their human hosts. Humans develop or retrograde when the encoding of a particular meme is successfully accomplished in their mental faculties. The spread of a meme depends on its hosts and the infection strategies through which it controls these hosts.

Within a meme-infected ideosphere, humans are necessarily either active or inactive meme-carriers. However, the meme-mechanism reveals continuous metalepsis.

Meme-hosts keep swapping roles; membots play memoids and memoids play membots exchanging influence by incessant infection. Unavoidably, they are all meme-targets.

A critical battle is launched between the individual and the society.

Continuous social interaction provides the proper and fertile ground for meme- infection. It marks the most distinguished contamination tactic. People fail to resist the on-going contamination strategies and turn into propagating membots.

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Zrekah Individuals, no matter how powerful, are powerless in front of the unabashed memes which eternally seek to engulf them.

Replication and imitation represent the integral media of meme-transmission.

Based on these methods of transmission, the components of a particular community are either membots or memoids. According to the memetic dichotomy, some hosts play the ―membots.‖ Membots represent the active instruments of meme- propagation. The concept is defined by Grant as someone who ―has become subordinated to the propagation of a meme, robotically and at any opportunity‖

(Grant, 1990). Membots are self-assigned agents whose ultimate aim is to spread a meme and infect others with it.

Memoids are usually the indefensible victims of the un-defiable membots.

They are the recipients of the viral units. According to Grant, these are people

―whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a [meme] that their own survival becomes inconsequential in their own minds.‖ Some memoids display a serious suicidal drive under the effect of their meme-infection. They develop a nihilistic propensity that necessarily leads to their demise.

Contaminated hosts eternally transmit memes to new hosts. The unconscious infection occurs when the fixed memes are internalized within a host‘s consciousness and manifested in his/her imitative conduct. According to ―cultural evolution,‖ society follows a selectionist method. It stresses and reinforces the memes that stress and reinforce its authority. It employs censorship as well to eliminate less conforming memes from the overall ideosphere. The goal is to control the individuals‘ belief-space. These ―individuals‖ radically change into mere membots whose demeanors reflect their subordination to their memes and echo their function in meme-propagation. Closely-limited belief-spaces characterize

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Zrekah memoids in particular. Their life and welfare are insignificant when regarded in the shadow of meme-propagation. Generally, these belief-spaces are occupied by memes related to the social laws entrapping humans.

Memes go through a selection process where the ―fittest‖ memes, in the social sense, survive. This selection method is based on the competitive nature of memes.

Memes compete over the finite belief-spaces of potential hosts. The publicly- accepted memes overpower and eliminate the private convictions. Memes go through society‘s sieving machine. Some memes are disqualified conferring advantage to other memes ready to occupy the outcome void. The ideosphere is defined by the code competition. Memes compete ―for niches in the belief-space of individuals and societies.‖ This is attributable to the hypothesis that ―there is a limit to one‘s belief-space‖ (Grant, 1990).

Severe processes of ―deterritorialization‖ and ―reterritorialization‖ take place on the ideological level (Deleuze, 1983, 33- 34). Society engages in a memetic brainwashing mechanism through which it controls the memetic composition of its components. It seeks, through implicit procedures of decoding, replacement and replication, to validate its memes and control its memepool. This tragically entails a de-immunization, de-individualization, dehumanization and, memeticization of the targeted elements.

Meme infection is a key rationale of the eradication of individuality. Memes related to class-structure, finance, gender dichotomy, education, beside religious notions, co-evolve to compose a ―mutually-assisting meme-complex‖ (Grant, 1990).

They form a group of co-memes that float around the consciousness of their recipients luring them implicitly to absorb and reproduce them. These propagated memes incorporate ―individuals‖ within their traditional social structure. A social

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Zrekah coalescence is reached on the level of thinking, or non-thinking. The divided become one.

Society is memetically constructed as a web of baits, hooks, threats, and memeplexes. It is a booby-trapped organism. Illusions of social integration and peaceful life, for instance, are some baits justifying the propagation of particular canonized memes. Society is, thus, crowded with countless memes that coerce people and penetrate into their minds. It is a massive memepool the essence of which is forcedly projected on every member through the omnipresence of memes.

They control all through unconditioned subjugation.

Inspite of vaccimation and immuno memes, society manages to reinforce its hegemony. It confronts vaccimation with pre-set packs of ―immuno-depressants.‖

Infection becomes inevitable. People are powerless in front of the persistent process of meme-contagion. They are defenseless under the mammoth might of the merciless memes.

Dawkins concludes his meme-related chapter in The Selfish Gene with his dissection of the human construction. He affirms that, ―[w]e are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines‖ (Dawkins, 1989, 201). Culture, as

Dawkins asserts, is a meme-based formula by analogy to humans who are gene- based formulas. Culture seems to be no more than a ―cult‖ where a cult is a memetic sociotype ―composed of membots and/or memoids‖ (Grant, 1990).

Society is a petri dish. Its ―culture‖ is culturing. Individuals are cultured like laboratory cell cultures. Within its sphere, the virus-like units proliferate in the same way meme-infected people do. This metaphor underpins the memetic view of community. This gigantic petri dish provides the appropriate conditions for the cultivation and propagation of precise memes. The Victorian society armors itself

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Zrekah quarantining its memes and population within its sealed atmosphere. Within this immense petri dish, subjects are produced via precise conditions that are determined through meme-infection. Memes are the units that cultivate subjects within society and draw the course of their development through memeticization.

Dawkins introduces memes as ―the new replicators‖ (189). His concept has a double sense. Memes reproduce themselves, multiply and spread through imitation.

On the other hand, they generate through their multiplication mentalities that are similar to one another. Society aims at breaking its components and normalizing them into subjects, or in the language of Althusser, subjected ―subjects‖ (Althusser,

1971, 170).

Meme-infection leads to extreme personal tragedies and the termination of special potentials into the abyss of memetic orthodoxy. Society is an irresistible dictator. Its tyranny is canonized and consecrated. Alternatively, Society reacts meme-allergically to fresh individual enterprises. These are doomed to expire. In a social context, to defy is to die; to be distinct is to be extinct. Under social hegemony, to live according to one‘s own morality leads to mortality.

The focus is on ―mental representations,‖ the notions controlling social relations, mainly conventions. The technique of their maintenance and transmission is meme-contamination. The private thinking of a character experiences a suffocating effect inflicted by memes the spread of which takes a nonlinear track.

The innate need for interaction provides the ground for the transmission of memes among interactors within a particular environment. Coming into contact with society facilitates and fortifies the processes of social contamination and meme- internalization. The outcome is a copycat who operates as a proper agent of the

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Zrekah community. Individuals are dragged from their utopian fantasy to be plagued by their dystopian reality.

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Zrekah B. The Literature of Memes:

Memetics and literature are inextricably interconnected. Memetics opens upon new dimensions within a literary context. It suggests that fictional works begin and end in meme-infection. It views works of art as the pure production of meme- contagion. Memes impose themselves upon the consciousness of their targets and haunt them. Memetically defined, a work of art is a meme that contaminates the mind of the artist without his conscious confirmation. It is a meme that spreads through infecting the minds of its recipients. Beyond the addressers and addressees of literature, Memetics is the interplay of membots and memoids.

Literature is an arena dominated by the dominant memes in a particular society during a particular time. It is, thus, a replication realm. This conception of art goes far back in time. It stresses Plato‘s definition of literature, in his The

Republic, as ―imitation or mimesis‖ which, by turn, defines the artist as an imitator par excellence. All literature is mimesis in Plato‘s sense. It is an imitation of an imitation, the fundamental technique in meme-transmission. Hence, Memetics might very probably recall and confuse with Plato‘s ancient concept of ―mimesis.‖ The two notions are similar, but not identical. Mimesis is pejorative and negative. Technically, mimesis is a method of Memetics. The transition is strategic from literature as mimesis to literature as Memetics.

Literature is a vortex merging the various memes and the diverse patterns of belief-spaces. It is a set of long-established memeplexes. This dimension approaches memes as content; multiple memes in a single text. Literary texts have been analysed for long without recognizing the memetic roots of the social, historical, financial and other cultural units integrated within them. The literary analysis never wanders from the objective behind the literary documentation of the spreading

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Zrekah memes: to write with or to write back. The aim is to draw attention to the hostility of society. Roger Webster discusses the composition of literary works in his

Studying Literary Theory (1990). He confirms that:

Literary texts can be seen not only as constructions, but as important sites of

historical debate in which the conflicts and tensions of an age are worked

through, either to harmonize and disguise oppositional tendencies, or in an

attempt to alter the established and dominant power structures. (Webster, 1990,

65)

Literary Memetics also addresses the mechanism of literary production.

Writers are besieged by memes. This perspective stands in sharp contrast with the ever-celebrated concepts of creativity and literary genius. The hypothesis is that a work of art is not an original product of a creative composer. It does not emerge from the imaginative intelligence of the artist. Literature is not a question of Muses, it is a question of memes. Artists are not creative minds that continuously come up with new ideas. They are infected creatures rather than inspired creators.

Inspiration is a euphemism for meme-internalization.

The memetic proposition regarding literature is not merely about repetition. It is a gradual infection developing into total literary eruption. Memes seem to achieve maturity in the minds of writers before being poured into literary forms.

Writing is a comatose activity exercised under the effect of the omnipresent memes.

This memetic orientation towards literature addresses previous contributions to

Literary Theory. It touches on the modern notion of T. S. Eliot, which he introduces in his reference article ―Tradition and the Individual Talent‖ (1917).

Eliot proposes that the mind of the artist is nothing but a ―catalyst‖ functioning like

―a filament of platinum‖ in a chemical equation (Eliot, 1934, 18). It functions as a facilitator without which the production of the literary work is impossible though it 10

Zrekah is not an original parcel of it. This metaphor illustrates how artists work as targets and mediums of meme-transmission.

Artists are meme-hosts infected by particular literary memes which they propagate through their works. These memes force their way through writers‘ consciousness residing confidently and dominantly in their publications. According to Memetics, the outcome is the meme reproduced. Hence, the new construct could be exactly the opposite of the original premise. By contrast, Eliot‘s dialectic theory of creativity suggests that the new construct of the combination relates to both premises. It unites the two contradictory sources.

When perceived away from its exact sense, Eliot‘s concept of ―tradition‖ bears even deeper implications. Hardyan fiction concretizes the sharp contrast between

―tradition‖ and the ―individual talent.‖ His texts seek the attention and sympathy of his readers presenting them with uncommon characters, misfits. These heroic personae challenge the ―tradition‖ and shine among other contemporary characters beaming with their transcending freshness that opposes Victorian decadence. Thus, the conflict between innovation and the domination of memes is defined. The depicted tragedy comes from the fact that the blooming potential of the ―individual talent‖ is overcome by the rotten ―tradition.‖ This marks a revisiting of individual- society conflict where Hardy interrogates the degenerating and dominating core of society.

Eliot emphasizes the voluntary death of the new voice in favor of the past.

Tradition should be reborn in the production of the new generation. Production is thus a mere reproduction. Literary genius for him is to die and let the past be revived in one‘s work. Harold Bloom considers the same conflict as an agon between ephebes and masters. The expression he uses for this notion is stated as the

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Zrekah title of his book, The Anxiety of Influence (1997). Every ephebe is in a strong need to kill his master metaphorically. Otherwise, he/she is doomed to fail. The anxiety of influence is memetically analyzed as a conflict between membots and memoids.

The ephebe is a host whose lack of immuno-memes causes his total defeat by the precursoral meme. He/she is infected by the membotic master. Memetics suggests that the ephebe is infected by the literary meme. He/she is powerless to defy the meme. In the end, the new voice defeats the precursor and becomes the new master.

This is replication with variation. Thus, the Theory of Memetics proves to be already there. It occurs in disguise through other preceding literary theories.

The best memetic manifestation is intertextuality. Art is a rich meme-pool.

Literary themes and topics are infectiously reiterated among various works of art through different times and ages. For example, in her theory of Intertextuality, Julia

Kristeva, expresses this notion in her definition of a literary text saying, it ―is constructed as a mosaic of quotations‖ (Kristeva, 1986, 37). These are not innocent quotations. They are memetic quotations. Following the Kristevan pattern, a text is a medley of previous, pre-dominating, and privileged literary memes. Texts are host-texts subjected to the authority of other membotic texts.

In his introduction to Writing Degree Zero (1953), Ronald Barthes affirms that,

―It is under the pressure of History and Tradition that the possible modes of writing for a given writer are established; there is a History of Writing‖ (Barthes, 1970, 16).

Barthes stresses that no writing can escape incarceration. Writers work under the authority of particular memeplexes the control of which can only be undone by an impossible immunity. The presentation of memes depends on their function, whether to celebrate or write back. They materialize in the form and content of the formed texts. The recurrence of literary premises raises them to the status of contagious memes that are inherited down time. 12

Zrekah The argument that it is memes rather than genes is already emphasized by the concept of ―Tabula rasa,‖ as defined by John Locke. Locke initiates his work, An

Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), with the first Book entitled ―Neither

Principles Nor Ideas are Innate‖ (Locke, 1999, 27). Memetics does not seem to challenge and compete with these earlier contributions. It seems to be justified and authenticated through them. Memes are propagated, installed, and reproduced through Locke‘s experimental approach. Humans cannot escape memeticization.

Memes are always there to fill their, originally, blank slates. They can also turn them into palimpsests. Memes, whether negatively or positively, represent human experience.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) deploys in his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), a variety of long-established memes. The marriage meme, class meme, gender meme, new-woman meme, religion meme, creed meme, repentance meme, rebellion meme, wifedom meme, husbandom meme, martyrdom meme, and other memes dominate the text. In Hardy‘s fiction, the memetic theme, supported by elements of the form, is maintained with a genuine persistence in a tragic context to reiterate the primary premise: environment kills.

The male protagonist of the text, Jude, postulates a summary of Sue's extreme change: ―Can this be the girl who brought the pagan deities into the most Christian city? … quoted Gibbon, and Shelley, and Mill? Where are dear Apollo, and dear

Venus now!‖ (Hardy, 1999, 276). Furthermore, can this be the girl who categorically refuses marriage? Can this be the girl who plays with boys as a child without feeling any difference? Can this be the girl who lives independently in

Christminster? Can this be the same Sue who masters a masculine profession: engraving? The massive change in Sue, moving from one extreme to another, the

―creeping paralysis,‖ is the most important issue in Jude. 13

Zrekah The structure of Jude the Obscure echoes its thematic depth. Maneuvering the form to highlight the ―space‖ stresses its significance; not as a physical sphere, but as an ideological ideosphere. The parts constituting the text all refer to places; the cities, towns and villages where the protagonists settle through their lives. These places form the various ideospheres that, by turn, coerce the characters and haunt them with their memes. The form of the text emphasizes the content. They are complementary with mutual support. John Goode confirms that the temporal in

Hardy's fiction is spatial. He argues, in his Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth, that the ―division into ‗phases‘ spatializes temporal changes‖ (Goode, 1988, 110).

This spatial is embodied in the ―At‖ liminality. Indeed, the novel cannot be properly understood without stopping at ―At.‖ All the parts constituting the book start with ―At‖: ―At Marygreen,‖ ―At Christminster,‖ ―At Melchester,‖ ―At

Shaston,‖ ―At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere,‖ and ―At Christminster Again.‖ The repetition of the preposition confirms, with its liminal connotations, being on the threshold. The text reiterates neither ―in‖ nor ―out.‖ It stresses ―at‖ alluding to a state of suspension where characters are in-between contrary situations. ―At‖ enjoys a poetics of its own. It means that a character is nothing but a doormat. It highlights the conflict dominating the novel. Sue and Jude lack the sense of belonging to the places at which they find themselves. The fluctuation that characterizes them stems from their misplacement. ―At‖ also symbolizes imprisonment within an ideosphere.

It means that characters are incarcerated within their Victorian ideology. Their ideoshpere tyrannically reigns over them.

John Goode also analyzes ―at‖ affirming that, ―‗[a]t‘ doubly decentres—it is an exclusion, since none of the places demand your presence, and an imprisonment since only by being domiciled at that place can you get work‖ (Goode, 1988, 146).

This theme echoes the modernity of liminality and the neither-nor positionality. It 14

Zrekah also addresses the track of literature as circularity and the theme of incarceration by belonging.

Jude begins by defining the centre of gravity. Cultural influence embodied in the character of Phillotson, the non-Fawley teacher, precedes the concept of genealogical heredity embodied in the character of Aunt Drusilla Fawley. The meme comes before the gene; the book before the blood; the teacher before the parent; and the school before the family. Following this pattern, the novel is organized as contrapuntal. The indicated deconstructive mode of the novel is identified by the fact that every character and every element have their counterparts.

Only by juxtaposing the representation of characters, readers can grasp the thematic and conceptual binary opposition. Every character has its opposite representation.

Exactly as Sue has Arabella, Jude has Phillotson, old Aunt Drusilla has old Mrs.

Edlin, and Phillotson has Gillingham. These binaries are highly paradoxical stressing the conflict of the self and the other. Each character is exactly what his/her other is not. The early scene of Jude holding the two buckets of water symbolizes the duality that governs the whole novel.

In Jude, characters are and are not at the same time. Sue is modern and she is not. She is Jude's wife and she is not. She is the new woman and she is not. She is rebellious and she is not. Jude is intellectual and he is not. He is Sue's husband and he is not. Arabella is the typical woman and she is not. Phillotson is conventional and he is not. Even Christminster is the city of dreams and it is not. Sue emphasizes the conflict in a serious argument. She says, ―I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really

Mrs. Phillotson‖ (Hardy, 1999, 163). Every character comprises his/her own counterpart; everything is and is not at the same time.

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Zrekah The contronymousness of characterization is embodied in the first encounter between Jude and Arabella. The peculiar scene of Jude's first meeting with Arabella is a physical representation of the abstract concept of meme-infection. This episode is a concretization of man being haunted by a meme that is beyond his control.

Walking absentmindedly and thinking of Christminster and its intellectual glamour,

Jude is interrupted by the aggressive force of the ―physical‖ meme that literally slaps him on his temple. Falling in the snares of a powerfully controlling meme is unavoidable.

Jude starts the novel loaded with a strong mutation of the historic rising- meme. He seems like numerous characters from the literary and theological heritage he reads. Sue tells him, ―[y]ou are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened‖ (162). Don Quixote is possessed by the knightly memes, and Jude is possessed by the Quixotic memes. Don Quixote is infected by the fiction he reads, and Jude is infected by the Quixotic books he reads.

Instead of devouring the books, the books devour him.

Although Jude stands at the farthest spot from the physical meme embodied in

Arabella, he is unable to challenge its dominion over his consciousness. He is de- immunized and infected with the meme. While on his way to ―catch‖ new ideas, an idea catches him. Instead of being a discoverer, he becomes a receiver. Instead of becoming a don, he is undone by Arabella Donn.

Society is a system of repression and domestication. Social traits, put in the words of Ronald Barthes, are ―forever anterior, never original‖ (Barthes, 1967). This idea confirms the validity of memeticization. In a more exact sense, Susan

Blackmore, explains in her, The Meme Machine (1999), that, ―[h]uman creativity is a

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Zrekah process of variation and recombination‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 15). Her statement emphasizes mutation in the framework of imitation. Memes assert their virus-like quality through displaying definite social signs. Blackmore summarizes the memetic proposition declaring that, ―[o]ur memes is who we are‖ (22). The grammar of

Blackmore‘s declaration identifies the collective power memes exert upon individuals. They work communally as a unified dominating body imposing their weight upon the submitting subjects.

Richard Dawkins reiterates, towards the end of his The Selfish Gene, that,

―[w]e, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators‖ (332).

Opposed to the optimism of this hypothesis, and with an ultimate Hardyan pessimism, Hardy‘s characters are deprived of this opportunity. They are fatally determined to be subjected to their ―selfish genes‖ as well as to the ―selfish memes.‖

The text, realistically, characterizes them with fake immunity that fails to help them confront the unrelenting memes. The mutations occurring in his writing verify their inability to survive in their social context without being modified. According to natural selection, the basic principle in cultural evolution, mutations are not competent to compete with the ―normal‖ memes that are inherent within the typical societal ideology. Heavy processes of decoding and encoding are applied, in a negative and unconscious manner, to Hardy‘s unconventional characters. Their privacy of mind is ―defiled,‖ as Jude says, under the influence of the memes that suffocate their quest for freedom in life and strife.

The conclusion of Jude, in particular, does not suggest a compromise with society and its norms. It is a portrayal of the eventual submission under memetic hegemony. Memes are forcefully imposed upon characters who are brainwashed and metamorphosed to embrace them. They sway towards adapting to their ideoshpere. Instead of vivid creation, characters exhibit meme-originated reactions. 17

Zrekah The authoritative memes undertake a metaphorical castration that is similar to

Kathleen Blake‘s feminist thought about ―complete amputation‖ where conscious will and individual spirit are thoroughly amputated (Blake, 1978, 725). Even Sue refers to this by assimilating her situation as a married woman to that of a person with an

―amputated‖ limb (Hardy, 1999, 168). She is conscious of her loss. Memes indicate the end of subjectivity. In literature, this end is manipulated to raise the sense of loftiness and reinforce the effect of literary metaphors. In Jude, the literal end of the self, death, stands as a witty metaphorical reference to the symbolic end of the self; meme- subjugation. Memes signify a perpetual extinction of personality. It is not artistic creativity per se. It is memetic infectability. Fiction is technically composed by meme-infection: It is the fiction of infection.

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Zrekah C. “Steel Traps”:

The impossibility of survival is the core of characterization in Hardy. Jude the

Obscure portrays a group of characters suffering continually till the disastrous finales extinguish their light and exterminate their life. These characters fail to defy and avoid the ―steel traps‖ that keep hindering their enthusiastic life course (Hardy, 1999, 169).

Hardy's metaphor of the ―steel trap‖ symbolizes the double-natured traps, biological and ideological, laid sinisterly before characters. The metaphor goes to the heart of the text and explains the unexplainable: why all the characters, good and bad, high and low, eventually fall. The symbol derives its power from the fact that it is not just a

―trap,‖ but a ―steel trap;‖ unavoidable and unbreakable. The realization of the way characters are ambushed ominously is fundamental to understanding the text as booby- trapped. Hardy depicts a dual siege weighing upon the consciousness of his characters and triggering their eventual tragedy. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate and diagnose the dialogic origins of the painfully tragic events in Jude.

This study is memetically conducted. It scrutinizes Jude and attempts a new dimension following the principles of meme-transmission. It endeavors genuinely to draw attention to the contribution of memes to mind-control cooperating maliciously with natural principles of body-control, worked out by genes, towards individual eradication. The concepts of biological heredity and cultural trappability blend to accomplish the designated mission. Under these cruel ethics of combined biology and ideology, Hardy's protagonists yield to their destiny. They are overwhelmed by the inevitability of personal calamity in an utterly bossy society. This new memetic approach works hand in hand with previous studies of Hardy's text to come up with a new interpretation of the raison d'être of an inexorable and an inevitable double tragedy.

19

Zrekah A new understanding of the concept ―double tragedy‖ urgently imposes itself. It proposes a modern view towards the construction of Hardy's tragedy. The female-male tragedy combination is marginalized by a more intriguing dimension of the traditional concept. Hardy's double tragedy is defined more accurately and less traditionally as a gene-meme tragedy. These two master elements unite forces to make tragedy inevitable. The loser is the individual. She/He is victimized under the power of immoderate replication units. This nature-culture coalition against Hardy's protagonists entails individual annihilation for social preservation. Hardy's protagonists

Sue and Jude sink under the double imitative competence of the biological genes and the cultural memes.

Jude the Obscure is loaded with numerous allusions to the catastrophic role of familial heredity. Biology is usually highlighted as an essential ingredient in the recipe of bitter tragedy. However, memes are addressed, in this dissertation, as a more crucial and more influential component of the tragic melody the text plays. In his ―Postscript‖ to the 1912th edition of Jude, Hardy introduces the character of Sue as ―the woman of the feminist movement-----the slight, pale ‗bachelor‘ girl –the intellectualized emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in the cities‖

(8, [My italics]). The dualistic language of Hardy brings together the physical and the nonphysical. He points out that environment is responsible for ―producing‖ a revolutionary type of woman-thinking, the New Woman. Society gives birth only to murder. It liberates only to hegemonize. It intellectualizes only to domesticate.

Therefore, Sue demonstrates a fresh conduct generated by her ―intellectual atmosphere.‖ Still, Hardy's text proposes the notion of the questionable survival of such a figure in an especially constructed community. It addresses the memetic conflict within Sue and identifies the victorious memes; the memes of Victorian conventionality. The conditions, which produce Sue, condition her. 20

Zrekah Sue is formulated by her ―modern conditions,‖ as Hardy says, and tragically demolished by her ―Victorian‖ conditions. In both cases, a kind of social dynamic is at work through which Sue is twice affected, and with which she is twice infected. Sue is practically betrayed. Her atmosphere fakes innovation only to perform suffocation. The

―city of light‖ extinguishes Sue's own light. She embraces the illusion of liberty which her environment forges. Suddenly, the illusion is shattered. Pretences fade away and the rotten essence holds sway. Sue is the victim of a simulacrum of an advanced and liberal environment (Baudrillard, 1981). The truth lying behind layers of hypocrisy unmasks Sue‘s ideosphere which turns out to be extremely repressive and reactionary.

Sue‘s beliefs undergo a radical ―internal distantiation‖ and a ―retreat,‖ Lois

Althusser‘s terms in his ―A Letter on Art‖ (1966), from their original basis (Althusser,

1971, 223). She radically resorts to the sphere of collective ideology suffering an intrinsic disorientation from her own thinking. She seeks remedy and comfort in the conformist course mastered by society‘s reactionary mentality. This argument summons Jude's exclamation concerning the change in Sue. He argues saying,

―[s]trange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of woman‖ (Hardy, 1999, 315). Sue is ideologically estranged from society in the beginning. By contrast, she is eventually estranged from her own being to meet the demands of her ideosphere. Later in the text, Sue plays the surrendering repentant having no power to resist memetic hegemony. Althusser stresses that ideology ―slides into all human activity‖ (223). It technically ―slides‖ into all human consciousness through unconscious and infectious approaches.

In the same way, Jude's tragedy is continually attributed to his ―two arch-enemies

... [his] weakness for womankind and [his] impulse to strong liquor‖ (278). However, these are unreasonable grounds when compared to Jude's cruel social circumstances

21

Zrekah and dominant memetic ideosphere. He is the defeated party in a brutal battle of wills,

―individual will‖ defying ―memetic will.‖ Jude reiterates the phrase, ―we are circumstanced,‖ twice proving the authority of some extrinsic factors (167-191). His circumstances, the non-biological and non-genetic elements, with their memetic dimensions, menacingly encircle him, stifle his aspiring soul, and eradicate his ambition.

No matter how members of non-conforming nature can tolerate the coercive power of society‘s symbolic, spiritual, and memetic violence, they eventually collapse.

Accordingly, the implicit process of meme-infection keeps progressing softly till it is crystallized in reproducing and propagating the dominant memes in their memepool.

Characters are disinterestedly injected with these memes regardless of their opinion.

They are introduced with a pre-set pattern of behavior and pressured under the control of the surrounding ideas, beliefs, customs, and memes to conform to it. By extension, society is keen on a long-term, metaphorical and ideological ―cloning‖ where the creativity of the individual opposes the cloning of society.

Society unquestionably proves itself free of guilt by laying the blame on individuals. Here comes the trickery of Hardy's tragedy. It looks like an apriori biological heredity, fate and pre-determinism. But, it is more of a posteriori meme- infection. This notion echoes the more specific feminist argument of Simone De

Beauvoir. She stresses, in her The Second Sex, first published in 1949, that, ―[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, woman‖ (De Beauvoir, 2010, 330). She explains her repeated statement confirming that,

No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human

female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this

22

Zrekah intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine.

(330)

Toril Moi‘s Sexual Textual Politics (1985) adopts the same idea of the ideological basis of gender definition and discrimination. Characters are locked up mercilessly and helplessly between two alternative quagmires: They are pre-destined by biological heredity and post-destined by ideological heredity. The environment that surrounds

Hardy‘s characters unmasks its own malicious intentions. It also stresses the validity of

Lance St. John Butler‘s suggestion in his Studying Thomas Hardy (1986). He emphasizes that, ―Hardy moves the character and environment together towards the fated conclusion‖ (Butler, 1986, 27).

Biology and ideology merge in the text. Ideology is represented through biological means. The natural and cultural components of the societal equation overlap leading to a non-relenting end. The collective effect develops into collective conduct.

Cryptic as it seems to be, Hardy's tragic masterpiece brings about an exquisite revelation. The intrinsic genetic flaws turn out to be extrinsic memetic cracks. The biological seems to be a camouflage for the ideological.

23

Zrekah II. Jude the Obscure:

A. The Unbreakable Bubble:

Jude the Obscure (1895) is strategically based on undecipherable moments. Why does the intellectual Jude fail? Why does the intellectualized Sue fall? This is a why- novel. As will be seen, to disentangle the mysteries, Memetics is strongly needed.

Memes are the cause and the answer. A variety of memes and co-memes play a vital role in the unrelenting misery of the characters. Society and its memepool are the basic culprits in the tragedy of Jude. The gradual unfolding of the tragic events in the text is analogous to the unfolding of a serious recognition of meme-infection. Jude is infected.

Sue is infected. No character, as will be seen, escapes infection.

Against all expectations of defying the dominant system, the protagonists fall victims of their hegemonic society and its soft weapons. Without conscious awareness on their side, Jude and Sue are contaminated by the menacing ideology of their ideosphere. They fail to avoid the contagion process at work within it. Lois Tyson explains this occurrence in general terms in her Critical Theory Today (2006) suggesting that, ―we‘re all influenced by various ideologies all the time, whether we realize it or not‖ (Tyson, 2006, 60). The influence she identifies is precisely termed as ―Cultural

Inheritance.‖ It is the horizontal transmission of social mores in the form of unavoidable spreading memes. Characters in Jude inherit a cultural past of failure in personal relationships and a present of subordination to the internalization and production of ratified memes.

It is more than Herbert Spencer‘s ―Social Darwinism‖ (1983). The process of memetic contagion draws consciousness according to the pre-established memplexes.

These memes literally colonize the consciousness of the characters and police their thinking and behavior. The ephemeral individuality of characters is lost after severe 24

Zrekah memetic processes of reductionism and metaphorical castration. Society necessarily takes the initiative; aborting new enterprises. Representatives of these enterprises and the possible spreading of novel memes threaten the stable life a society establishes for long to lead for long. The memetic battle starts; tradition-based memes move incessantly exposing more nonhosts and infecting them. By this mechanical memetic movement, society controls its inhabitants and enjoys more vigor in converting the dissidents or ousting them.

The main characters in Jude follow different tracks in their exposition to the dominant memes till their complete infection dominates their behavior. The first membot to infect Jude is his teacher Richard Phillotson with his Christminster meme, being-a-don meme, pursuing-knowledge meme, and reading meme. The fact that he is

Jude's teacher confirms that his influence is not genetic or genealogical. He has the power to contaminate the boy‘s mind without being a family member. He crosses the familial boundaries. Similar to other characters, he is a meme incarnate. Jude seems to be fully haunted by the Phillotson memes; the meme of scholarly ambition and the meme of idealism. The teacher leaves Marygreen after requesting Jude to ―[b]e a good boy … and [to] be kind to animals and birds‖ (Hardy, 1999, 11).

From this early stage, the theme of memetic conflict pops up before the readers: the meme of ―idealism‖ competing with the meme of ―realism.‖ This continues throughout the text. It echoes the spiritual-physical clash. Therefore, the perfect justification is Memetics par excellence. Indeed, the novel alludes continually to the institutions that are responsible for a consistent contagion: schools, colleges, thinkers, and books. This confirms that the center of gravity is memetic not genetic.

Furthermore, the efficient spreading of a meme is not measured according to the truthfulness or sincerity of its memotype. It depends on its successful contagious qualities which will be discussed in detail later on. 25

Zrekah The semi-seclusion that characterizes Jude's life keeps him away from the inherited memes of his society until he is dragged out of his bookish shelter by his second membot, Arabella. Being in contact with others provides, as Blackmore suggests, ―a larger and more varied meme pool‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 210). Jude abandons his haven magnetized by Arabella and the memes he is exposed to in her company. Sexuality and the marriage memes are the major two arrivals into his memetic reservoir. He is exposed to them, and consequently infected with them. The strategic incident of meeting Arabella demonstrates that people do not catch ideas.

Ideas catch them.

Sue goes through various stages of meme-infection. The first stage opens her character up to social recognitions. She is then infected with the Mill-meme and other similar memes of the same nature. She knows that she is surrounded by many memes and she seems aware of their propagation. Still, the immunity that she believes this awareness entails is misleading. For long, Sue thinks she can resist the common thinking of her ideosphere empowered by the knowledge she has. Her education and intellectual affair with the Graduate provide counter memes that defer her conformity.

Still, they do not guarantee a durable shield against other meme-contagions. They are temporary vaccimes with no permanent powers. The internalization of the dominant memes within Sue's consciousness is implicit while their activation is bombastic.

In the second stage, the threat, the bait, and the right infection strategy are ready to achieve their effects on the first occasion and cause an irreversible infection. Here,

Sue becomes the proper Victorian woman by internalizing with her newly-activated memes all the attributes that make her one. All her earlier memes are refuted with one sharp declaration, ―We must conform! … and we must submit. There is no choice‖

(Hardy, 1999, 269). She affirms the necessity to conform attributing this urge to religious grounds. She continues, ―It is no use fighting against God!‖ (269). In short, 26

Zrekah she is deluded by a group of phony memes. By effect, she deviates from noticing the active contagion going on within her. By contrast, Jude is more conscious of the contagion. He succinctly diagnoses the situation: ―I was gin-drunk; you were creed- drunk. Either form of intoxication takes away the nobler vision‖ (307). Memeticization is intoxication. Gin and religion reinforce meme-contagion. The irony is that the more

Sue denies infection, the more she is unredeemably infected.

Sue‘s ideosphere comprises a variety of motives towards conformity. Her culture is one of intolerance. To continue in this atmosphere, submitting to meme-infection and professional imitation are the key. The least liability to be infected is vital to the conversion-toward-fusion. Embracing contrary convictions is not enough to boast an immune personality. Blackmore refers to the overwhelming power of memes by observing that, ―[i]f memes can get copied they will‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 217). They exploit every opportunity to get copied. Still, the copying is not as Blackmore suggests throughout her argument about the ―false idea‖ of the ―selfplex‖ (231). She portrays the process as ―waking from the meme dream‖ (243). It would be more proper as a waking to the meme reality.

Sue wakes up from a deep illusion of a fortified self to a reality governed by meme-based traditions from which she thinks she is free. Thought Contagion (1996) by

Aaron Lynch discusses the family-structure memes. The book suggests that, ―even women who initially reject the domestic wife meme can end up playing a domestic maternal role‖ (Lynch, 1996, 54). The always- rebelling Sue wakes from her deluded slumber to be a devoted wife. This decline is buttressed by her earlier transformation from an other into a mother [my italics].

Sue is not simply the ever-cherished ―bundle of nerves‖ (Hardy, 1895, 8). She is, in Blackmore‘s sense, a physical meme machine. She does not process memes; they

27

Zrekah process her. They alter her personality according to their memotype. She is always a construct of some pre-set memes playing their faithful membot or even memoid.

Blackmore introduces her idea supported by a powerful quotation from Marx himself.

She ascribes the construction of consciousness to the social units constructing society.

She proposes that, ―[a]s Karl Marx (1904, p. 11) argued ‗It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness‘‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 235). The social existence engenders the memes that not only construct but colonize consciousness. Society thus enjoys being the unbreakable bubble.

28

Zrekah B. Survival of the Submissive:

“Memes enter our minds without our permission. They become part of our mental programming and influence our lives without our even being aware of it.” (Brodie, 2009, 126) Thinkers have been busy for long addressing the enigma of identity; its texture and structure. The more they define it, the more indefinable it becomes. Who we are is not sufficiently defined according to the commonly studied theories. The definition of our true make-up does not come from the inside, the infrastructure of psychology and Freud. It does not come from the outside, the superstructure of sociology and Marx. For Humanism, the term ―identity‖ is symbolized by its initial letter: ―I.‖ This approach glorifies individuality and celebrates its distinctiveness.

For Freud, the term ―identity‖ shrinks to its two initial letters: the ―id.‖ This dimension proposes a controlling unconscious reigning over the concept of identity.

It stresses that identity is out of control.

It is clear that the more they try to fathom identity, the more unfathomable it becomes. However, a new definition comes unexpectedly from a totally new direction. The irony is that it comes as a fatal blow to identity. Memetics provides a new answer which is a door opening onto fresh thresholds. It takes a step forward annihilating identity as non-existent. Memetics defines identity as an Other.

The new age also needs a memetic understanding of the concept ―subject.‖

Questions as ―What is it to be human?‖ and ―What does it mean to be human?‖ cannot be accurately answered unless regarded in the light of the theory of

Memetics. It provides new insights as to whether humans are free subjects or subjected subjects. Freud tries to attribute eccentricity to psychological grounds while feminists argue for a social political reading of the same issue. Memetics, by contrast, assumes that humans are not free; they are puppets.

29

Zrekah These questions entail more issues: What is it to be a woman? What is it to be

Sue? What is it to be Jude? Hardy's characters are created according to particular socially-approved memeplexes; nothing is theirs. They are prohibited from being what they want to be. Here, the problem of ―what makes them?‖ is raised. If Sue is not Sue, who is Sue? Or what is Sue? If Jude is not Jude, who is Jude? Or what is

Jude? The answer is the memes. Dawkins proposes, in his The Extended Phenotype

(1982), that, ―the organism […] is a communal vehicle for replicators‖ which is ―an entity whose attributes are affected by the replicators inside it‖ (Dawkins, 1982,

112). They carry the common memes under a variety of pretexts, like honor, reputation, and penance. They never invent, only mimic.

The Psychological Theory of Sigmund Freud leads to a definite précis; one does not really know oneself. In his The Ego and the Id (1923), the dissection of personality into its three components or ―realms:‖ the ego, the id, and the super- ego, strongly underlines the disunity of the self. The person is only a site of conflicting memes. He/she is crisscrossed by the variety of agencies formulating the outcome of a ―subject.‖ For Freud, personal behavior within a group is checked by the ―super-ego.‖ Memetically speaking, the ―super-ego,‖ or the ―ego ideal,‖ is constructed through meme-infection. Its structure is based on particular ratified memes for what to do, with the elimination of the improper memes that fail to pass the propagation test. The internalized memes pose as the raison d'être behind repression and psychological distresses.

Freud puts forward a related notion arguing that, ―[o]wing to the way in which the ego ideal is formed, it has the most abundant links with the phylogenetic acquisition of each individual—his archaic heritage‖ (Freud, 1923, 33 [my italics]).

Freud attributes the construction of the super ego to a hereditary basis. Applied to literature, characters inherit the elements making up their super ego and their 30

Zrekah conscience, vertically from previous generations and, more effectively, horizontally from their surroundings. Freud continues his argument suggesting that, ―the origin of the super-ego […] is the outcome of two highly important factors, one of a biological and the other of a historical nature‖ (31). The fictional biographical account Hardy presents his readers with exceeds the individualist essence to which such writings connote. Memetics seeks to analyze how a definite Victorian ideology infects, and gets inherited by, characters.

Freud‘s propositions closely intersect with memetic premises. He proposes that, ―[s]ocial feelings rest on the identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego ideal‖ (33). Thus, Freud ascribes a social phenomenon to psychological origins rather than interpreting his psychological hypothesis using social grounds. Imitation seems to be embedded in Freud‘s statement. He elaborates on the nature and origin of the ―identification,‖ referring to non-biological parental heredity. He argues on the nature of this identification:

we have that higher nature […] in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative

of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these

higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into

ourselves. (32 [my italics])

Heredity is not always genetic; it is, to some extent, memetic. Furthermore, Freud integrates gendered ―cross-inheritance‖ within his analysis of the construction of the ego ideal. He visualizes the process of accumulating a super ego as man acquiring particular ―social feelings‖ and ―moral acquisitions‖ which ―seem to have then been transmitted to women by cross-inheritance‖ (34 [my italics]). The absorption process Freud touches upon in his argument self-consciously stresses its memetic basis. Considering Sue's conditions, she lives parentless-ly. Her unavoidable

31

Zrekah parental influences come from all four corners of her late Victorian environment.

No wonder Sue releases the cause of her trauma.

As Martin Heidegger explains in his book, What is Called Thinking? (1968),

―we … can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time‖ (Heidegger, 1968, 8).

Meme-infection is accompanied by a forced disinfection. Of course, the reserved memes serve the social status quo. These processes of infection and disinfection lie at the heart of the transformation occurring in Hardy. The most untraditional characters become hosts of the most traditional memes.

This metamorphization is achieved by Herbert Marcuse‘s ―repressive desublimation.‖ The term is insufficiently defined, in his One-Dimensional Man

(1964), as ―replacing mediated by immediate gratification‖ (Marcuse, 1964, 75).

Marcuse identifies the mechanism of desublimation by arguing how society ―is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the ‗higher culture‘‖ (59).

This strategy operates by ―extending liberty while intensifying domination‖ (76).

Repressive desublimation guarantees homogeneity for society by using quasi- liberty. Society uses the exact freedom that leads by itself into repression. Hardy's characters are thus deluded. They believe too much in their freedom so that they do not realize that it is not freedom. Sue and Jude are never given the liberty to do great things that elevate them with their achievements. They are burdened by the negative version of freedom that stigmatizes them with its transgressions. It should be stressed that this freedom is not ―got,‖ ―won,‖ or ―obtained‖ from society. It is simply ―given‖ by society. This autonomy is not a reward. It is a bait towards full memeticization and repression.

Almost everything in Jude is repressive desublimation. Society gives nonconforming characters a façade of liberty and a charade of free will. It gives

32

Zrekah them the ―freedom‖ that keeps them under control. So, it should be better called: quasi-freedom, repressive liberty, and dictatorial democracy. Characters live this

―freedom‖ under the supervision of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent society. Sue is not allowed to stay unmarried. Jude is not allowed to enter

Christminster. He is not permitted to become a don. Simply, they are not given the freedom that takes them higher. They are compensated by the lower liberties that have nothing to do with their elevated objectives.

Characters develop backwards into membots hosting and propagating traditions by acting according to their dictates. They might become even memoids sacrificing themselves, their happiness, and their love, to abide by the conservative memes that are commonly approved within the cult constituting their society. They cannot cross the boundaries of their social role and endanger society. Jude's attitude before the crowd on the Remembrance Day embodies this mechanism. When he is cornered and rejected at Christminster, he starts to understand the cause behind his miserable conditions. He gets the idea that his inability to imitate lies behind his difficulties. It comes in his own words illustrating to the reader that he is ―in chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example‖ (Hardy,

1999, 256). Of course, Arabella is his best example and his membot. But, his memeticization is not fully accomplished through her.

Striving for survival is fruitless unless based on a painful sloughing off one‘s individuality. ―Individuality‖ no more refers to an independency. It means memeticized subjection. To continue in their infected ideosphere, Hardy's characters must follow the infected pattern. They need to act out their memeticization to reclaim their right to live. Roger Webster, discussing the Marxist

Theory in his book Studying Literary Theory: An Introduction (1990), redefines the

―individual‖ taking into consideration all the surrounding elements: ―the individual 33

Zrekah is not free to determine his or her life, but subject to the forces of control which operate in a given society‖ (Webster, 1990, 80). Here, the anthropocentrism of the

17th and 18th centuries is negated and replaced by reification. These ―forces of control‖ negate the individuality and canonize the subjection. Webster continues that this thinking ―deconstruct[s] the processes by which the individual has been traditionally thought of or constructed as the centre of the world and reality‖ (80).

Although Webster does not mention it in his discourse, the meme is the focal point.

It is the core of personality and community.

―Individuality‖ does not develop inwardly. It is a fragmented entity made up as a smorgasbord of various memes. It is subjected to the power of memes that shape social behavior. Memes have many backgrounds, gender, class, religion, and social mores. All these precede individuality. Consequently, the ―individual‖ is preconditioned. In the same context, Webster concludes that,

Rather than possessing individual freedom and a unique, unified

consciousness, people as subjects were now viewed as socially constructed

through language, or discourse, and the various institutions and forms of

communication which circulated and reinforced the sense of individual

identity. (80)

Although his argument is a bit contradictory in itself, Webster draws attention to the elements and institutions responsible for effacing individuality. Characters are a socially controlled, and memetically constructed, pastiche.

The exerted reconditioning goes beyond the domestic sphere and all its memplexes. There are further authorities, pregnant with more powerful memes.

They play the leading role in reprogramming through memeticization. Tyson puts forward that, ―[t]he family unconsciously carries out the cultural ―program‖ in raising its children, but that program is produced by the socioeconomic culture 34

Zrekah within which the family operates (Tyson, 2006, 64). The process develops from narrow conditioning to broader programming. The cultural pattern is decided and spread through memes. They construct and preserve the existence of that culture.

Although some of Sue‘s choices impart some revolutionary characteristics, her decisions burn with their memetic fuel. She survives through the expression of her latent, but strongly present, conventional memes. The eruption of her infection starts after the so-called scandal at the Training College. She survives socially through marrying Phillotson. However, different memes of a totally different heritage determine the course she undertakes later. Leaving her old husband and dedicating her emotions to Jude is a materialization of a subconscious meme. Her behavior incarnates an unconscious infection with a prehistoric meme. Beyond the passionate attachment between the two lovers, there are ancient memes related to the strategic choice of potential mates; she chooses the young mate with the characteristic features similar to hers.

The supposed, even illusory, comfort Sue experiences after re-marrying

Phillotson is best explained by Richard Brodie, in his Virus of the Mind: The New

Science of the Meme (2009). He illustrates one technique of meme encoding called

―cognitive dissonance‖ where,

people end up believing they have received something valuable, something

deserving of their loyalty, when in reality all that has happened is that the

people who were torturing them have stopped. (Brodie, 2009, 131)

Here lies the tricky nature of the ―association memes,‖ Brodie‘s term, which oppress Sue. She unconsciously associates conformity with comfort in her social life disregarding the cost this reconditioning demands.

35

Zrekah Infection due to association is highly penetrative defying contrary personal beliefs. The painful situation Sue falls in after the death of her children implants an overwhelming crisscrossed association between different memes facilitating her infection. Her discourse with Jude concerning the role of Phillotson in her life is rich with its illustrative comments. Although she does not frankly express her inner confusions, she grows particular emotional reactions based on the associations she unconsciously considers. She associates pain with disobedience, and rest with remarriage. Phillotson, with his logical thinking, provides the justification for the achieved reconciliation. He believes that, ―[i]t is for our good socially to do this [re- marriage], and that‘s its justification‖ (Hardy, 1999, 291). The decision for reuniting what is disunited stems from memetic origins. It ends in becoming one with the determined memepool.

Seeking to alleviate Sue's worries concerning her first husband, Jude fruitlessly tries to convince her that, ―[her] mind is free from worries about him now‖ (258).

Her response, however, reveals her sneakily infected state:

―Yes, I suppose so. But I am weak. Although I know it is alright with our

plans, I felt a curious dread of him; an awe, or terror, of conventions I don’t believe

in. it comes over me at times like a sort of creeping paralysis.‖ (258 [my italics])

This is a good opportunity to recognize the power of memes. Even if she does not believe in them, they conventionalize her. Even if she does not accept them, they haunt her. Sue concludes unquestionably by asserting to Jude that, ―[she is] still his wife,‖ where ―[o]nly the thought comes to [her]‖ (258). She reflects on her subliminal meme infection. She is haunted by the thought by her own confession.

Despite her will, she succumbs to the weighing power of the meme. Sue ―can‘t explain‖ the source of the idea but still has it irresistibly. As Robert Aunger‘s

36

Zrekah expression goes, ―information inheritance has occurred‖ (Aunger, 2000). At this stage, all efforts towards aborting the infection process are useless.

Brodie argues that, ―[w]hen you sell people a bundle of memes, it can program them to spend the rest of their lives behaving the way you want them to‖ (Brodie,

2009, 139). Nobody sells Sue the memeplex of necessary conformity. She, unconsciously, develops her infection due to being exposed to external effects, supported by her cognitive dissonance. She recognizes the foundations that determine people‘s judgment on her and adopts the final judgment with all the memes it is embedded with, Brodie‘s term. The infection takes place implicitly by bundling the memes into a memeplex representing a unified Trojan horse that supports the weak memes by the power of the coordinated ones as Brodie explains.

Gradually, the memeticist reaches a dangerous conclusion pointing to ―the tyranny of the majority‖ (175). This point is elaborated in his direct statement, ―Meme evolution is not designed to benefit the individual‖ (184). Memeticization implies a reduction of ―individuality‖ from an active consciousness into a passive subject aiming at survival through getting into shape within the assigned memepool.

Webster differentiates between the representations offered in different schools of writing and criticism. He demonstrates that ―literature in [the Humanist] tradition [has] tended to stress the uniqueness and autonomy of each individual, emphasizing freedom of choice, the imagination and the power of individual action‖ (Webster, 1990, 79). By contrast, the post-structuralist notion of the concept

―individual‖ is of a ―subject‖ who is pressed under the suppressing hailing voices of his society, using Althusser‘s terms (Althusser, 1971, 170). In short, society guarantees survival for its proper agents labeled as the suitable citizens. These represent the hosts and membots of a particular set of long-established memes and memplexes that construct and maintain society. 37

Zrekah Sue's unparalleled declaration, ―I ought not to love you—any more. O I must not any more!‖ is loaded with her new image of the ―subjected‖ personality (Hardy,

1999, 275). Sue's infection is expressed through her words. Criticizing Jude's blindness to his ideospheric memes, she addresses him sharply, ―you are like a totally deaf man observing people listening to music. You say ‗what are they regarding? Nothing is there.‘ But something is‖ (276). Her awareness of ―what there is‖ is overwhelming. Sue seems to be ―pricked all over‖ with meme-pins ―bleeding out‖ all her convictions (271).

Jude accuses the world of bearing full responsibility for the failure of their personal dreams. He gloomily considers the thought that, ―[p]erhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!‖ (277). The world is rather darkened by approved memplexes. There is a fine-tuning operative within the memepool. The aspired aim is to fashion ―birds of a feather‖ as Brodie suggests (Brodie, 2009, 116).

Being rejected by the Society Jude joins in Aldbrickham comes as a direct outcome of meme contagion and the effect of ―birds of a feather.‖ The infection process is hidden behind a thickly painted façade of harmony between various convictions. The narrator relates that the Society‘s members are ―young men of all creeds and denominations, including Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists,

Unitarians, Positivists, and others—Agnostics‖ (Hardy, 1999, 239). With all the difference their variety implies, they still demand ―a common standard of conduct‖

(240). After all, common memes do control the society.

The air is not empty; it is a meme-crowded ideosphere. Jude and Sue ―had the same trick‖ as children, as aunt Drusilla says, ―of seeming to see things in the air‖

(91). Various baits and hooks ambush characters towards achieving memeticization.

38

Zrekah The meme precedes all. Characters are late-comers infected with the meme and indoctrinated by the meme. To be satisfied characters need to submit. But if they disobey, they will be domesticated. The association meme is supreme.

39

Zrekah C. Social-Construction and Self-Destruction

Society is a narcissistic structure. Its survival and dominion are its most important objectives. The memetic contribution to the ―individual‖ works subversively. The memes besiege consciousness and exert full control over it. To preserve social stability, contradictory processes of construction and destruction are undertaken. The destruction of ―individuality‖ is a necessary procedure since it threatens and undermines the collective makeup. The alleged function of memes is to build the personality by their collaboration and communication. This façade hides the truth about memes demolishing personality, rather than polishing it. The dominating essence of society, through the circulating memes, triggers a sense of

―esprit de corps.‖ It is the lofty spirit of the group.

Hardy's Jude resembles a ―Bildungsroman‖ but in reverse. The Victorian novelist seems to express the retreating nature of his time on the level of individual awareness. Instead of developing towards completion, Hardy's protagonists dissolve within the communal spirit of their ideosphere. The ―novel of growth,‖ which is based on principles as: ―reconciliation that involves the balancing of social role with individual fulfilment‖ and ―completion through enlightenment,‖ develops in reverse

(Childs, 2006, 18). The social role overcomes and obliterates the desired individual fulfilment. Creativity shakes under the burden of the ―power of memes.‖

In Jude, the attribute of ―questioning the truth‖ fails to continue as the major characteristic of Sue and Jude. The melting-pot called ―society‖ gradually forces them into its furnace due to the all-pervading nature of memes. The identified pre- established social memes point a finger at the egotism defining society which functions as a de-humanizing processor. Memes strip individuals of their differentia specifica. Through the window, Sue expresses to Jude her deepest conflict saying: 40

Zrekah I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my

counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a

woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable

antipathies. (Hardy, 1999, 163)

The Mrs.-meme and its social connotations repress Sue and distress her. She fails to recognize who she really is regarding the clash in her character. Continuous de- individualization and domestication take place on the level of private personality.

Purity of individual consciousness seems to be annihilated. Gradually, the emancipated characters become ideologically emaciated. They take in the general mood and reproduce it. In the name of harmony, society imposes hegemony.

Roger Webster highlights a notion proposed by Louis Althusser. He explains how ―Althusser's contention is that people are not in fact unique and unified individuals free to determine their own lives but that it is convenient to let people believe they are‖ (Webster, 1990, 60). This is similar to Susan Blackmore‘s refutation of the ―self‖ and the ―free will‖ it implies. She argues that, ―[f]ree will, like the self who ‗has‘ it, is an illusion‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 236). It is as if Althusser, just like Blackmore, stresses the illusory nature of individualism, and the self, when socially contextualized. Individualism in a Victorian context is nothing but a mirage. This façade hides an utmost conventionality. In this sense, the indicated concepts, with all physical, metaphysical, and social aspects are questioned.

Ironically, the ultimate freedom enjoyed due to a unique personality marks the peak of the memetic effect.

The argument continues; the individual, for Webster, relapses to a non- coherent, non-unified, and non-self-contained entity. It becomes ―fragmented and a site of conflict in that various forces were seen to position and construct him/her in

41

Zrekah different and often contradictory ways‖ (80-81 [my emphasis]). Enjoying the view of some beautiful roses, Sue says to Jude: ―I should like to push my face quite into them—the dears! … But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them‖ (Hardy,

1999, 233). Her personal desires are checked by the memepool into which she is drowned. The fragmentation takes place due to an encapsulation endured under the devastating power of particular memeplexes.

Society is, allegorically, a prism through which individuals pass and never maintain their integrity. By means of this social prism, Hardy's characters are splintered. They are reduced to mere fragments of their original characteristics. The preserved elements are the traditional memes. On the other hand, the dropped parts can be claimed to be the revolutionary and idiosyncratic memes that fail to compete other dominating memes. The principle of selection is clearly present in this context. Memes exist in a state of continuous ―rivalry to death.‖

In Jude, the infanticide, which Little Father Time commits, is one example illustrating how society mercilessly follows the principle of selection. The sensitive character of the child is infected with a dangerous meme. Its memotype is that survival is neither for children nor for the poor. Calling the child ―Father‖ is a reverse of genetics. After the tragic episode takes place, Sue experiences an

―artificial resurrection‖ (Baudrillard, 1994, 4). She undergoes an epiphany on the ideological level through which she is ironically hypnotized. In usual epiphanic scenes, the sudden awakening adopts a positive and existential representation.

However, Hardy presents his readers with a new mode that can be seen as a counter-epiphany. This is denoted as the hypnotizing effect of a character‘s memetic surrender. Sue's memes are detected in her words. She sermonizes to Jude saying:

42

Zrekah ―I have thought that we have been selfish, careless, even impious, in our courses,

you and I. Our life has been a vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is

the higher road. We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of

Adam! ... We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of duty!

But I have always striven to do what has pleased me. I well deserved the

scourging I have got! I wish something would take the evil right out of me, and

all my monstrous errors, and all my sinful ways!" (Hardy, 1999, 270 [my italics

and underlining])

Sue‘s argument goes to the heart of Memetics. She comes too close to capture the source of her enigmatic tragedy only to deviate again. Her speech conveys the opposite of what she tries to express. The references Sue makes to necessary sacrifice and duty emphasize her selflessness. Ironically, the more she argues for her selfishness, the more she confirms her selflessness. Memetically speaking, the selflessness that Sue tries to camouflage means that she has become a memoid. Her life has no meaning for her compared to the reproduction of the dominant memes in her ideosphere. She is ready to resign herself, to sacrifice herself, and to surrender forever. The objective is to propagate the memes with which she is infected. To be a memoid means ceasing to be. It means lifelessness and death; both metaphorical and literal.

Sue‘s choice of pronouns varies between the two halves of the above-stated extract. When she starts counting the negative aspects with which she believes she is stigmatized, she uses the pronoun ―I.‖ This ―I‖ that she keeps reiterating with dark connotations signifies individuality and independence. She associates her ―I‖ and every singular ―I‖ with evil. Having an autonomous ―I‖ is threatening to the homogeneity of society. It is a menace that needs to be identified and eliminated.

43

Zrekah Sacrifice is the same course followed by the two female protagonists of the text: Sue and Arabella. While Sue sacrifices herself for others, Arabella sacrifices others for herself. They are only media through which she survives. She destroys

Jude by marrying him first and destroys him again by leaving him to find another husband. The most important thing for her is her survival even when this means the death of others. Like a selfish meme, its interests are success and propagation. Its existence is the core issue even when it annihilates its carrier. Arabella is the objective correlative of the selfish meme. When one vehicle is dead, she immediately finds another. Selfishness is the secret of success. Survival is not only for the selfish meme but for the selfish membot.

The episode of the pig‘s killing marks one occasion manifesting Arabella's selfishness. Dispatching her son alone from Australia also devastates the biological basis on which the concept of motherhood is based. The cultural and the memetic prevail over the biological and the genetic here. The final and most selfish act

Arabella undertakes is deserting the thirsty Jude on his deathbed. By contrast, Sue's major problem is her unselfishness. She has no desire to harm Jude or anyone else in order to gain personal benefits. Consequently, she has no chance of survival.

Arabella is a membot but Sue is a memoid. No wonder, the uneducated Arabella instructs the educated Sue about the ABC of survival.

Society is a rectifying organism. The unconscious process of meme-infection is one manifestation of social violence within the closed orb of the group. Society commits a memetic massacre to mitigate the memetic tensions within its realm. The group repeatedly, sometimes implicitly, harasses the characters‘ spirit of uniqueness. Their convictions suffer fatal attacks from the publicly-ratified memes.

44

Zrekah Society is booby-trapped. It only accepts the flawed characters: characters with cracks. This recalls Erich Fromm‘s notion of the ―phenomenon of socially patterned defect‖ which occurs in his ―The Psychology of Normalcy‖ (Fromm, 1960, 141).

Society never accepts individuals unless it inflicts a fatal crack on their personalities. At the same time, they are to blame for their crackability. Unselfish individuals have no place in selfish society. This is what happens to Sue after the murder of her children. She starts to argue against her own approach to nonconformity. At this stage, social values emerge as the blessed alternative which would have brought tranquility rather than tragedy to her family. She almost shrieks, sobbing mournfully with deep grief:

We must conform! … All the ancient wrath of the Power above us has been

vented upon us, His poor creatures, and we must submit. There is no choice.

We must. It is no use fighting against God! (Hardy, 1999, 269)

The triple repetition of the auxiliary ―must‖ is expressive. There is no need for society to coerce her. Sue is ready to coerce herself into an obligatory harmony with her ideosphere. Ironically, she will not only submit, she will lead her own submission to orthodoxy. The change in her memetic composition prevails after the crisis of losing her children which is the perfect opportunity for meme-infection and memetic activation. Her extremity is their golden opportunity.

Society takes advantage of Sue's weakness to reshape her consciousness. As

Althusser confirms, ―consciousness is constructed through ideologies‖ (Webster,

1990, 60). Thus, Sue‘s progression turns into regression, which is ironically seen by society as real progression. The only place where individuals are allowed is

―within‖ society, with all that is implied by ―within.‖ The world seems to be darkened, like Tess's ―blighted star,‖ by its dominating memes (Hardy, 1991, 21).

45

Zrekah At this stage of her de-velopment, the construction of Sue‘s consciousness is based on the memes she gets from her ideosphere. The reactionary, and religious, ideology colonizes her consciousness when she has no power to resist. Her flaw is the forte of her foes.

The characters of Arabella and Phillotson, in Jude, infect others to seek refuge under society‘s vast umbrella. Hardy's genius manifests itself in the duplicity employed in his writing. He maneuvers gender relations to convey a serious message; meme-contagion is overwhelming. Arabella is the major factor triggering conformity in Jude. She is his membot. He is her memoid. Her womanly attributes are the first helping factors in her mission. The novel highlights how blind imitation, blind following, and blind replication destroy individuals. Meme- infection is the key rationale of the annihilation of individuality and the establishment of society.

Sue is the unhappy consciousness that refuses to accept social norms. She represents Herbert Marcuse‘s ―Great Refusal – the protest against that which is,‖ seeking spiritual and intellectual gratification rather than instinctual fulfilment

(Marcuse, 1964, 66). Her character contradicts the terrestrial and Natural context of most Hardyan writing. Sue belongs to ―the artistic.‖ She is of the ―higher culture.‖

She is brought down to the earthly social order due to the ―absorbent power of society‖ which ―depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic content‖ (64). This assimilation happens through some ―ideological operations‖ which, in turn, echo Paul Marsden‘s concept of ―behavioral contagion‖ in

Memetics ([Webster, 1990, 65] and [Marsden, 1998]). The result of both processes is the same. It defines a different Sue who buries herself under heaps of socially

46

Zrekah oriented memes. She becomes a passive social sponge assimilating what she takes in from her social surroundings.

In art, ―sublimation becomes the cognitive power which defeats suppression while bowing to it‖ (Marcuse, 1964, 79). Hardy's representation of Arabella is perfect ―sublimation.‖ The accurate reproduction of the memes she internalizes from her society guarantees her survival with a rather higher status. Besides, she already seems to have the ―replica‖ mentality. Everyone for her is a mere replica.

She goes from Jude to Cartlett and from Cartlett to Vilbert and from Vilbert to

Jude's friends while he lies deserted on his deathbed. Although she is ―the lower,‖

She manages to rise through replication and adaptation. Indeed, not only do the lower win, but the lower they go the more they win. The lower is the higher and the higher is the lower. This is how the vicious administrator, society, regulates itself.

The violence René Girard discusses, through his Scapegoating Theory is merely physical (Girard, 1987). However, the metaphorical violence suffered by

Hardy's protagonists in their social milieu is more unsympathetic. In Jude, the collective violence is social, ideological and psychological rather than physical. It is, in short, memetic violence that has two dimensions. It can be taken from a

―memetic view point‖ where violence occurs among the competing memes themselves. The other dimension is detected by considering the confining effect membots display among their fellows. This perspective is obvious when Sue is harassed and eventually expelled from the Training College. She is the perfect scapegoat to be sacrificed. Her banishment summarizes the institutional strategy to abolish and undermine the revolutionary spirit of the Sue-meme and reinforce the conventional memes. The collective reaction to the non-conformative tendencies of the protagonists marks one aspect of the violent treatment they socially receive.

47

Zrekah By contrast to Tess who is deflowered, Sue suffers many ―de‘s.‖ She is systematically de-socialized, de-spiritualized, de-liberalized, de-intellectualized, de- humanized and as Jude himself says ―defiled‖ (Hardy, 1999, 318). The more she is sued, the more she is de-Sued. These are epitomized in the act of memeticization to which Sue is subjected. Socially contextualized, the bright are banished while the brainless are blessed. Consciousness is a curse.

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Zrekah D. Membots: Agents of Conformity:

Hegemons are powerless without being adorned with and empowered by a group of faithful agents who labour to preserve and propagate their principles.

These dedicated membots are needed to spread and circulate their masters‘ pre- established memes within the controlled ideosphere. Supported by the genuine efforts exerted by these agents, hegemons can achieve invincible dictatorship.

Society needs these components to guarantee full control over its members.

Sometimes, these agents are unaware of their role. However, the decoding of their symbolic representations and the reactions to these representations are elucidating.

They get memeticized until fully mummified.

Adopting the role of a membot may be an inevitable outcome of a feeling of obligation and commitment to a controlling society; its rules are better than chaotic commotion. Membots achieve personal benefits in their society. This role contributes to the disentangling of a serious enigma in Jude. No matter how low some membots are, they can survive and achieve higher social and economic status than others. The membots discussed in this chapter are mainly Arabella and

Phillotson.

Membots enjoy accomplished imitative powers that make their social roles healthy and effective. Being a non-objecting and copycat-like membot is paradigmatic of being a good citizen abiding by the rules of one‘s ideosphere.

Characters survive through their assimilation of the surrounding social norms and hosting the right memes. Moll Flanders, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe‘s fictional autobiography, enjoys the advantages of the addressed infection strategy. Moll does not believe her eyes. She is ―the greatest wonder of wickedness;‖ a prostitute, a thief and a deceitful woman (Defoe, 1973, 263). Still, at the end she is rewarded by

49

Zrekah heavenly providence. The memes provide her with survival and satisfaction.

Membots are vital mediums for bringing to order nonconforming characters.

Advocating and transmitting the emphasized memes of her society is the only way to grant an acceptable life for Arabella. To this end, her character tops the list of the active membots in the whole novel. Every time Arabella appears, she embodies the ideology of her ideosphere. Her existence in person, her speech, and her actions clarify the gap between the convictions of Jude and Sue, and the social memes she represents. Even before her debut, Arabella is able to identify the disparity between the ideology of her society, which she unquestioningly embraces, and Jude's individual mind and dreams:

In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude's walk had

slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking at the ground as though

the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern. On a sudden something

smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance

had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet. (Hardy, 1999, 32-3 [my italics])

This sharp summon towards reality forcefully interrupts the long course of Jude‘s private contemplations and high aspirations. The extract contrasts the flash of the vision with the blinding flash of the flesh. He looks ahead towards a tempting future while around him temptation is being woven within a piece of meat. The figurative representation of the ―flesh‖ refers to ―temptation‖ and the ―lower nature‖ as opposed to Jude's deliberation about education and the higher culture (Olderr,

1986). Flesh is a trap. It is the bait inducing Jude to host the marriage memeplex.

This moment is multi-confrontational. It marks a downward movement from the very top to the very bottom. The pig‘s organ hits Jude on the head and falls at his feet. The falling down is allegorical. It is a proleptic episode foreshadowing

Jude's own movement from the beautiful down to the ugly. The concrete journey of 50

Zrekah this piece of meat symbolizes Jude's abstract journey throughout the novel. He is brought down from perfect idealism into brazen realism. It is the theme of going back to the mud, to failure, to the filthy, and to earth. It is the version of realism defined by the two slogans: ―mystique de la merde‖ and ―nostalgie de la boue.‖

Arabella has the memetic power to bring Jude from the high ethereal to the low terrestrial. The piece of meat, being the male organ of a castrated pig, symbolizes

Jude's metaphorical castration; anti-climactic dreams and emasculated ambitions.

The event is symbolic in its potent paradox. While he is trying to catch a meme, a meme catches him. While he is trying to possess his own vision, a meme possesses him. This notion is found in Jonnie Hughes‘ article, ―Meme Theory; Do

We Come up with Ideas or Do They, in Fact, Control Us?‖ (2012). Moreover, this perception has a dehumanizing effect presenting Jude as an object rather than a subject. He seems redundant in the memetic war going on above his head. He is the battlefield of the conflicting memes that compete to occupy his limited belief-space.

Even when Jude is led to his downfall, his destiny is unimportant.

Before the materialized and undefeatable meme suddenly hits him symbolically on the head, he speculates to himself:

but I can work hard. I have staying power in abundance, thank God! and it is

that which tells… Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her

beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased. (Hardy, 1999, 32 [my italics])

From the peak of his ascending and heavenly ambitions, Jude is vulgarly pulled down to earth by Arabella's social and marital ambitions which are loaded in the

―meat‖ she flings at him. The pronouns ―her‖ and ―she‖ are zeugmatic. They refer to Christminster and to Arabella. ―She‖ will be his first school, woman, and tutor and he will be her first victim in whom ―she shall be well pleased.‖ Seeking the

51

Zrekah educational ideosphere of the university, he is dragged back. While Jude is mentally celebrating the mind, he is haunted by the body. Instead of being a creator, he becomes a carrier. Ironically, the novel opens with a representation of Jude as a carrier stuck between two water buckets. This critical position foreshadows the eventual memetic conflict of which he is a target; the Sue-meme competing against the Arabella-meme.

The analyzed scene embodies the chronicle theme of the ethereal-terrestrial conflict. Arabella directs against Jude a surprising and incontestable memetic attack. As a faithful membot, she aims at infecting Jude with the ―fleshliness‖ dominating her memepool. This episode vigorously comprises a climactic prospect of a rise by learning with an anti-climactic fate of a demise by lust. By effect, the social overpowers the individual and Jude is defeated beyond repair.

The first appearance of Arabella is impressive. She is the epitome of the image of a woman of her time. The sex she breathes is a basic requirement that every woman needs to survive in such a society. The text reveals, through the portrayal of

Arabella and her companions at her first encounter with Jude, that Arabella is no exception. All the women of Jude's time need to act exactly as Arabella and her country girls to be ―normal.‖ Everything else is an exception stamped as an abnormal ―tomboy,‖ like Sue. The narrator illustrates the girls‘ behavior when Jude watches them:

One or two pairs of eyes slyly glanced up, and perceiving that his attention had

at last been attracted, and that he was watching them, they braced themselves for

inspection by putting their mouths demurely into shape and recommencing their rinsing

operations with assiduity. (Hardy, 1999, 33 [my italics])

The three girls playfully parade before the potential groom their ―womanly attributes.‖ Physical attractiveness and enthusiasm in ―womanly works‖ are their 52

Zrekah confessed tactics to attract the young man. They mechanically reproduce the memes-with-power in their memepool. Their conventional behavior awakes in Jude the ever latent meme of prospective bisexual interactions. The concluding statement, in particular, discloses an ever-spreading meme of attractive females at that time. They are the dynamic and good-looking girls ready to play the role of a house-wife and a sex object. The narrator re-stresses this image when summarizing

Arabella's character as being, ―a complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less‖ (33). The concentration on the mere physicality of women is in itself a strategic meme in the text.

Arabella‘s mischievousness succeeds in distracting Jude from his focus and

―attracting his attention from dreams of the humaner letters to what was simmering in the minds around him‖ (33 [my italics]). This statement requires a memetic reading of the two characters‘ situation. Jude realizes the remoteness of what occupies the minds of other people sharing his social sphere. Arabella's effect on Jude‘s person and mind is summarized by the omniscient narrator stating that, ―[t]he intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how‖ (36

[my italics]). He is not conscious of the mechanism of meme-contagion to which he is subjected. He is aware only of its effects. At the point of his climax and rise, lies his thunderous anti-climax and demise.

The divergence between the memetic repertoire of Arabella and Jude is expressed in metaphors. When they first meet, a running stream separates them and when they finally move to meet, she leads him so that ―[t]hey [walk] in parallel lines, one on each bank of the stream, towards the small plank bridge‖ (34).

Walking in ―parallel lines‖ and the fact that Arabella has company while Jude has none are two manifestations of the difference between how the two lead their social 53

Zrekah lives. Arabella turns up to Jude from a homogeneous group and interacts with him according to the memes controlling it. She is the agent who spreads the memes to

Jude to re-channel his life. She simply extinguishes Jude's enthusiasm by infecting him. Arabella is the membot who will turn Jude later on into a new host.

The ―bridge," also, bears a deep symbolic reference. Its most famous mythical symbol is the bridge leading to paradise, a shared notion among most religions. It is the only way to reach eternal bliss. The awaited bliss on the other side of the

Hardyan bridge is that of communal comfort and social integration marking a

―connection between worlds‖ (Olderr, 1986). Arabella seems too much familiar with, and much expert with, crossing the bridge. On the other hand, Jude shows a fatal ignorance and unfamiliarity concerning the other side. The bridge is one critical turning point in Jude's life. He observes closely what awaits him on the other side. The image embodied in Arabella's person haunts him. Here takes place his elementary infection with the required memes to gain what lies beyond the bridge. According to Olderr, the episode symbolizes his ―transforming from one state to another;‖ from loneliness and disinfection to partnership and infection. He moves to a different ideosphere pushed by the lovely personified bait: Arabella.

The portrayal of Jude after parting with Arabella is memetically charged. His first direct exposition to Arabella and her memetic makeup positively infects him with the memes she exhibits consciously or unconsciously. His state of mind changes after coming into contact with the epitome of Victorian memes:

Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way, filled with

an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had just inhaled a single breath

from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been hanging round him everywhere he

went, for he knew not how long. (Hardy, 1999, 35-36 [my italics])

54

Zrekah By inhaling the air, Jude inhales what floats in the air: memes. He goes through a categorical change. Jude BA; before Arabella, the icon of purity and loftiness, changes into an infected, and earthly character, Jude AA; after Arabella. His experience proves that he cannot fly high in society. His viewpoint is the first marked area of alteration under the influence of the sharp contagion he suffers.

After kindling an irresistible desire within Jude, the following stage implies a forward step to emphasize the dating meme while the final subsequent phase is based on the hegemonic ―marriage meme.‖ Arabella successfully de-immunizes

Jude by making him feel the sting of guilt due to their audacious transgression of the dominant traditions that condemn pregnancy outside marriage. She infects him with an oppressive guilt meme that determines his following acts. This meme stirs a pungent feeling originating from defying the common memes of virtue and morality that reign in their conservative ideosphere. The threat functions effectively to enslave Jude under the authority of the marriage meme. He fears the scandal that accompanies un-socialized practices. In this way, he becomes more aware of traditions and their coercive authority. Just by circulating the right memes, the sinner can simply turn into a saint. Arabella, the tricky woman who selfishly seduces Jude, sexualizes him and deceives him into matrimony, continues in her surrounding as a virtuous woman. Arabella is able to transform Jude into a surrendering host of the chosen memes his society recommends. With the internalization of these memes, Jude takes in the spirit of his ideosphere.

Arabella's greasy fingerprints on Jude‘s books are a concrete image of the

―filthy and decadent‖ memetic imprints she leaves on his supposedly liberated consciousness. Hardy vividly portrays how ―Arabella's hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers‖ (Hardy, 1999, 57). The choice of ―grease‖ is expressive since it is 55

Zrekah associated with Arabella through the whole text. It also symbolizes the earthly and the vulgar contrasting the sublime memes carefully packed within the covers of the attacked books. The books, beside their symbolic reference to ―wisdom, divine knowledge, [and] the Bible,‖ represent Jude's mind with all the memes they provide to construct it (Olderr, 1986). However, this construction is soiled with Arabella's memes. Their effect is grand especially with the symbolism of the fingers. They refer to ―the powers of the unconscious that can emerge without warning and hinder efforts of the conscious.‖ Moreover, the hands and the fingers are phallic symbols ironically associated with Arabella. This reverses the gender roles. She is a he-Arabella and he is a she-Jude. Not only does she memeticize him, she metaphorically inseminates him and impregnates him with her seed-like memes.

With all its symbolic images, this occasion is analysed as a proleptic scene.

The ending is written in this early episode. Arabella has the power to entrap Jude and lead him against his deepest convictions. The painting seen in the pub during the couple‘s first date, representing Samson and Delilah, is inside the text. Still it enframes the text with its significance. Arabella is to Jude as Delilah is to Samson.

Arabella shears Jude's dreams by infecting him in the same way Delilah shears

Samson‘s hair and disarms him. The text seems to give privilege to its female characters. Jude is a woman‘s novel though it is entitled after its male protagonist.

The man is the memoid whose death concludes the novel. The woman is the membot who manages to survive by being the selfish meme. Arabella shows her selfishness whenever she acts or speaks. However, Sue's selfishness manifests itself late in the novel. Both women desert dying Jude. Arabella leaves him a dead corpse and accompanies the physician to the Remembrance Games. Earlier still, although

Sue knows that he is dying, she stops her ears so that she does not hear Jude's death

56

Zrekah pangs and sends him to his death so as not to be tempted again (Hardy, 1999, 307).

His coughs, like the song of the sirens for Odysseus, can haunt her.

The scene of killing the pig is a materialization of the contradictory memes according to which Arabella and Jude live. Arabella gets from her ideosphere a dangerous meme that says: ―[p]igs must be killed‖ (54). She highlights this notion as the principal meme to live upon. Deeper still, Jude identifies with the pig in the same way he identifies with birds early in the novel. Arabella's statement applies to him. Jude with the pitiful piggy characteristics his person shows, must be metaphorically killed by meme contagion. Meddling with the piggy stuff, Jude experiences a terrible ―transformation from the higher to the lower.‖ He is ―plunged into corruption‖ falling into a memetic impurity indicated by the symbolism of the pig (Olderr, 1986).

Arabella's memes transform Jude from a savior into a murderer, from a bookworm into a butcher. They summon him from the noblest to the filthiest.

Arabella mercilessly asks Jude to stick the pig to a slow death. However, Jude wants ―to make short work of it‖ (Hardy, 1999, 53). Arabella tries to infect Jude with the meme of selfish economic profit regardless of his resistance. She seeks to stir within him a desire for the material not the spiritual. Jude is changed from the most humane into the beastliest, and from the heavenliest into the earthliest.

Arabella's visit to the couple at their place at Spring Street in Part 5, Chapter

2, releases great infecting powers over their conflicting consciousnesses. With the immuno-depressants she unleashes, Arabella touches the vulnerabilities of Jude and

Sue and passes to them a medley of memeplexes. She raises the rivalry-among- same-sex-meme within Sue. Moreover, Sue mechanically resigns to a surrender- towards-control meme without even being exposed to Arabella in person. She

57

Zrekah surrenders to the role of a typical ―womanly figure‖ ready to satisfy her man‘s needs. Under the pressure of Arabella's presence, Sue ―agrees‖ to fit in the memetic mould designed for women. Arabella, the icon of self-accomplishment, thus, contributes to the fulfilment of their unity. Exactly as she transforms Jude into a sex-minded man, she manages to transform Sue into a sex-minded woman. She succeeds in contaminating the couple and reducing them from sublime ethereal characters into mere terrestrial ones. She sexualizes both Jude and Sue. Their course is thus changed from intellectualization to sexualization.

Arabella's presence raises and emphasizes the topic of ―belonging‖ between man and woman. She brings up the ―property‖ meme in the couple‘s discussions.

This marks the only occasion where Sue uses expressions like, ―[i]f she were yours it would be different‖ (Hardy, 1999, 209 [my italics]). The topic of women as

―propertized‖ by men, with implicit reference to the role of sexual intercourse in it, is addressed between Jude and Sue with no apparent dislike. Unconsciously, they come to accept what they have always rejected. They become anti-Jude and anti-

Sue by canonizing the same meme they have been defying for long. There seems to be a process of Arabell-ization of Jude and Sue worked out by memeticization.

While receiving Sue at the hotel, Arabella explains her ―philosophy‖ in life.

This episode is loaded with sharp irony. She sermonizes, while in bed, about the right memes any woman has to embrace to live properly in their Victorian environment. To become the proper woman, Sue has to go through Arabella. She has to internalize the memotype of her preaching. Defamiliarization and irony are used in this episode to intensify the conveyed message. Right from her bed, with all the symbolic meaning the bed implies, the uneducated Arabella gives a greasy sermon to the educated Sue. Arabella interrupts Sue in the same way she interrupts

Jude. The irony is that both are changed by means of Arabella's interruption. 58

Zrekah Memeticization is complete when Sue becomes a copy of her membot, Arabella.

Sue is re-baptized as a ―woman‖ by the greasy fingers of Arabella.

Direct interaction solidifies the memes inside their recipient. Although Sue‘s first reaction is to ―feel more than ever how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is—a sort of trap to catch a man,‖ her memeticization takes place while its eruption is belated (Hardy, 1999, 213). Arabella's potentials as an ―articulate‖ person are fundamental, in Susan Blackmore‘s sense. Having the communicative prowess contributes to her membotic task of circulating memes. She spreads her many memes with her many words. Language itself sounds to be contaminated. It is the vastest meme-vehicle.

When Arabella exclaims that ―poor folks must live,‖ her ―must‖ alludes to the subjugation she performs under the command of her society (54). She understands the operation of memes and the mechanism of society; to survive is to surrender. To be accepted, Arabella has to accept. Eventually, she internalizes and transmits the right memes. Getting infected with the Arabella-meme, Sue changes from being

―two-dimensional‖ into being ―one-dimensional‖ yes-person (Marcuse, 1964).

Jude can be boiled down into two major narratives. The text develops following a seesaw rhythm alternating between a plot and a sub-plot. The two narratives are parallel in the sense that both narrate how a female character fatally infects a male character. Still, they are not parallel; where the arrangement of the infection-processes is not the same. Jude's infection follows the pattern: Arabella –

Sue – Arabella, whereas Phillotson‘s contamination is determined by the arrangement: Sue – Arabella. Sue infects Phillotson so that he becomes ideal, less selfish, and ready to sacrifice all. He becomes a male Sue. The major conflict is triggered by the opposition between the memotype of the two memes. The Sue-

59

Zrekah meme brings both men upwards into sublimation. While the Arabella-meme drags them both downwards into desublimation. The clash subsides when meme competition is over. This is when the Arabella-meme defeats the Sue-meme and dominates the belief-spaces of the characters. Ironically, the two women become equal when Jude becomes a piece of dead meat. This brings the analysis back to the early piece of dead meat achieving textual circularity.

Phillotson has the privilege of being the first membot to appear in the text.

Early in the text, he infects Jude with the Christminster meme that controls the young man‘s dreams and life. Phillotson‘s role develops when meeting Sue. Her fluctuations to and fro conventions are due to his infecting potentials. She is being

―cultivated‖ by means of Phillotson's memes. Sue, despite her dialectic spirit, absentmindedly takes in and reproduces what Phillotson displays before her.

Throughout various phases of Sue's life, Phillotson seeks to affect her. He tries to infect her in the same way he infects Jude earlier. For unfathomed reasons, Sue cannot defy his authoritative contamination. Effortlessly, he leads her into entering the Training College. The narrator explains that, ―[i]t was Mr. Phillotson who had advised her to come there, and she wished she had never listened to him‖ (Hardy,

1999, 104). It seems that he does more than advising her. She realizes her inability to resist his memes though she rebels at certain moments against his influence. In other words, she shows something and hides its complete opposite. No wonder, she escapes from the Training College at night.

Phillotson‘s life is based on a single mode of indoctrination starting from his career as a teacher. Many memeticists, such as Aaron Lynch and Susan Blackmore, argue that the intellectual and social status of a membot plays a vital role in the effectiveness of his/her contagious capabilities. Phillotson is represented as a

60

Zrekah respectable schoolmaster whose infectious potentials impress others. His age, gender, vocation and intellectuality support his patriarchal authority. He enjoys the

―privileges‖ that make his person disarming and more persuasive.

Sue‘s first conversion, to which Phillotson effectively contributes, happens when she abandons her single life and goes into matrimony. She finds herself stuck to accept his marriage proposal and promise to be ―his,‖ neglecting the allergic feature the marriage meme triggers within her. Marriage is the objective correlative of a successful infection. The metaphorical analysis of Sue‘s attitude is pronounced after the episode of flinging herself out of the window. She exclaims, in response to

Phillotson‘s comment that she ought to ―lock‖ her door to avoid intrusion, that she

―[has] tried—it won‘t lock. All the doors are out of order‖ (180). She seeks to keep her doors closed, trying to preserve her immunity and retain the barrier separating her from her memosphere. Nevertheless, her words metaphorically highlight her vulnerability to imposed disturbances.

A ―door‖ symbolizes many things including ―female genitalia‖ (Olderr, 1986).

Sue wants her doors closed signifying that she wants to remain virgin. She wants to avoid sexual intercourse and evade marriage. But, the unlockable doors have a different say. The opened doors can also symbolize passages between different perspectives and meme-centered realms. They are opportunities to blend contrasting worlds and chances symbolizing the beginning of a change. Sue's remark is illustrative in that she includes all women‘s experience in the domain of being contaminated with the unavoidable sexuality meme. The doors symbolize the death of Sue‘s distinguished mind when intruded upon by the unrelenting memes. This theme is borne out by the text itself. Sue‘s doors are unlockable suggesting that memes are unstoppable and memeticization is inevitable.

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Zrekah Phillotson is one arena for an aggressive memetic competition. He is haunted by a group of contradictory memes that determine his discourse and demeanor. He is the host of diverse memes that target him from diverse membots; Sue, the school, his society and his friend Gillingham. He defies customs by giving his ―tortured wife her liberty‖ (Hardy, 1999, 196). His rebellion takes place when he is at the top of his enthusiasm, being infected with the Sue-meme. The social punishment he suffers, trailing his novel treatment of his wife, weakens him emotionally and socially. He is overwhelmed by the ―great social bodies‖ that criticize his approach accusing him of immorality. He regresses to the mechanical patriarchal figure who takes the first opportunity to assert his role as such. The social pressure fragments him into a flawed character. He is dwarfed as a mere victim of the meme. He is both a memoid and a membot of society. His failure foreshadows Sue's surrender later on. Ironically, her concluding submission is because of him and through him.

Membots appear everywhere. Their words and behavior unmask their missions. The character of The Graduate is a short-term guest in the text. Still, he plays the vigorous membot in the platonic affair he has with Sue. The ambiguous but knowledgeable character infects the ever-attentive Sue with all the literary and philosophical memes which she happily internalizes. He constructs her consciousness providing her with the food for the mind. Sue reproduces exactly what he presents to her. The un-physicality of his transmitted memes leaves no place for a different kind of liaison between them. Sue plays the faithful host and the perfect meme machine. The eventual death of the Graduate is symbolic. It identifies the autotoxicity of his memes promoting ―the destruction of their [host]‖

(Grant, 1990). He is mortified, as a martyr, by his memes. The membot becomes the memoid who dies because of his memes. The character of the Graduate seems to be the mirror image of Jude. Both have the intellectuality meme that clashes with

62

Zrekah the unintellectuality meme dominating their society. Furthermore, both die in the end where their death embodies their role as complete memoids.

Sue unconsciously plays the most straightforward and frank membot in the text. The infection of the pure mind of Little Father Time through his conversation with her is a fatal episode marking the chief turning point in the text. Sue does not elaborate in her discourse. Still, the child smoothly concludes, internalizes, and reproduces the memes that are implied in her comments and her concluding silence.

Little Father Time starts the conversation saying:

"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"

"Oh—because it is a law of nature."

"But we don't ask to be born?"

"No indeed."

"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother, and you needn't have had me unless you liked. I oughtn't to have come to 'ee—that's the real truth! I troubled 'em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I wish I hadn't been born!"

"You couldn't help it, my dear."

"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!" (Hardy, 1999, 261-62)

The episode is short but strategic. It encapsulates the theory and impact of

Memetics. It illustrates the selfishness characterizing memes. Sue is only talking in this episode. She does not want the child to die or commit any crime. She does not even try to infect him. Unknowingly, she is nothing but a vector for something more authoritative. She is the medium of transmission through which memes do their own business: replication. The selfish meme speaks in this scene through Sue.

Its selfishness crystallizes in that memes need to spread and succeed even when the price is sacrificing innocent victims.

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Zrekah Blackmore states that, ―vocalisation is a good candidate for increasing fecundity‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 102). She argues for the role of language and speech as integral and direct mechanisms for meme-transmission. Sue's words go home in the child‘s consciousness. Their memotype pollutes his mind with non-reversible memetic infection. The reader realizes the effect of Sue‘s speech on the insightful mind before her. Economic and social memes coerce the beliefspace of the child and he responds in the only way he finds favorable to their situation; suicide and fratricide. His justification of his deed, ―[d]one because we are too menny,‖ though in miniature, is a pure reproduction of the implicit memes that Sue transmits to him unawares (Hardy, 1999, 264). The memes colonizing the child‘s consciousness while conversing with Sue are auto-toxic: they eliminate their host. He reproduces and reinforces them with the infanticide action he undertakes. The tragic end is arrived at after dynamically being infected with the common memes, of social and economic basis, hegemonizing their ideosphere.

Most ideas are either a meme or a co-meme and characters seem to be either a membot or a memoid, interchangeably. Here lies the Dehumanization of art. A character is not a unified and integrated personality. He/she is a medium for meme propagation. Membots are not born as such. They are either the victims of a latent infection, or smart hosts who know how to work for themselves by working for the meme. For society, its canons are its fortifications and its membots are its agents towards full memeticization in the form of literal or metaphorical annihilation.

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Zrekah E. Mesmerized Memoids:

Jude the Obscure unfolds dialogically with the narrative ascending and the personal ―descending‖ towards the thunderous climax. The early representations are gloomily bright. The development of the narrative proves that Jude is not the distinguished personality he promises to accomplish. He remains, till his concluding dark death, a character confined and obscured by his environment. This chapter exemplifies the inevitability of contagion and identifies the memetic burden within the analyzed memepool.

Although he enjoys the qualifying talents, Jude, like Sue, fails to climb up towards luminosity. He climbs but to the chasm and rises but to the bottom. Jude is overwhelming but overwhelmed, ambitious but ambushed, and marvelous but memeticized. Everything in Jude is Judas. His convictions betray him. They fail to immunize him against memetic intrusion. The sneaking memes, also, betray him with the identity trauma they trigger. His internalized memes build a hypnotized personality which is unrecognizable by the character himself. There is a duplicity that raises the enigma of the text. Ironically, Jude is technically ―many in one.‖

Still, he lives all his life as one of many.

The ―counter-hegemonic‖ tendencies of the two protagonists, Jude and Sue, fail to defy the iron control. With their ―liberated minds,‖ they are able to uncover the mechanisms of societal suffocation. Still, they lack the capability to confront them. No matter how sublimated they think they are, memes are above them, around them and inside them. They point a finger at the ―conditions‖ as the coercive elements responsible for misery in their society. However, the sophistication of their mental prowess flattens out and fails to break the memetic siege. Jude argues that:

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Zrekah the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good

to us. And so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her, and

recklessness and ruin on me! (Hardy, 1999, 315)

Jude repeats the same argument explaining how they ―are circumstanced‖ (167-

191). Their quasi-memes are not mature to spread and resist the ―ripe‖ ones of their time. A similar loftiness shows up when he discusses gendered terms with Sue.

"Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That's what some

women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the conditions they protest

against the man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse the man

who crushes against her, when he is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put

upon him"… "Yes—some are like that, instead of uniting with the man against

the common enemy, coercion." (226 [my italics])

Although the issue Jude raises in this extract sounds biological, it is not exclusively biological. It demands a non-biological interpretation of phenomenal agony within society. It is more effectively ideological not biological; cultural not natural; memetic not genetic. This reading is borne out by the lexical dimension of the extract. Jude uses the words ―conditions‖ not ―roots‖ or ―genes;‖ ―man‖ and

―woman‖ not ―male and female.‖ He also uses other cultural and non-genealogical words like ―crowd,‖ ―pressure,‖ and ―coercion.‖ More importantly, the central phrase in Jude's discourse, ―helpless transmitter,‖ represents the central concept in the theory of Memetics. Jude's ―transmitter‖ equals the vehicle in Memetics when the negativity of ―helplessness‖ makes clear that the transmitter is not an active character who transmits but a passive medium through which a meme is transmitted. Because it is societal and political, Sue calls, in the end, for the unity between man and woman against coercion.

66

Zrekah The above-stated analysis is confirmed by Sue's comment on the common conditions of her time when she addresses Jude through the window. She puts forward her point ―in the tone of one brimful of feeling, ‗that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns‖ (162-3 [my italics]). Sue stresses that the ―moulds‖ are social, ironically fabricated by the so- called civilization. Through her metaphor, she reveals a rare understanding of the ultimate stereotyping undertaken by the Victorian society. The elements of this society are the object of a meme moulding, the objective of which is to reinforce materially the strict ideology of a strict social order. Regardless of gender or interest, everyone is targeted to be a meme host. The protagonists identify the problem, have the will to break the common cast, have the mind to challenge the mindless pattern, and intend not to be the same in the world of be-the-same. Still, they get meme-moulded. The irony is that the more they resist moulding, the more moulded they become. Memetic coercion, not just genetic heredity, leads to the tragic finale.

The hypnotic response Sue and Jude demonstrate towards meme-infection and their various acts of imitation are worth investigation. The futile efforts towards establishing new memes are refuted. Sue displays memetic allergy to the ultimate embodiment of the controlling conventions, the marriage ceremony. She keeps struggling against the marriage memeplex. However, the reader witnesses two bonds to which she commits herself before even surrendering and saying, ―it is no use struggling against the current,‖ (219). Furthermore, she acknowledges after her tragedy that her only legal union is not her ―natural attachment to Jude‖ but the marriage that is ―ratified eternally in the church at Melchester‖ (276). The enigmatic change in her mood, from private to public, is memetically

67

Zrekah understandable. The text unravels the implantation of the memes of moral laws, providence and social acceptability in the essence of the Victorian society and their transmission to its components.

Characters in Jude are subjected to the domination of particular memeplexes, which their society selects and recommends. They radically change to mere membots whose demeanors reflect their subordination to their meme-infection.

They also echo their eventual function in meme-propagation. The tragic dénouement of the novel indicates characters‘ intense regression into mesmerized memoids. Jude's remarriage to Arabella, the epitome of female-sexuality meme, and

Sue's dutiful return to Phillotson, her legal husband, summarize the mental change caused by meme contagion. Sue says:

I am going back to Richard. He has—so magnanimously—agreed to forgive all

... He is going to marry me again. That is for form's sake, and to satisfy the world,

which does not see things as they are. But of course I am his wife already.

Nothing has changed that ... be kind to me—a poor wicked woman who is trying

to mend! (283 [my italics])

In memeticization, there is no going forward. The only movement possible is going backward. In this extract, instead of shrinking from the marriage ceremony, Sue is ready to experience it ―again‖ only ―for form‘s sake.‖ The passage confirms an important dimension controlling the whole text: circularity. The past is ahead of her and the future is behind her. The terms used by Sue stress that her movement is from A to A, not from A to B. Whether she knows it or not, she gravitates towards a particular set of established memes from which there seems to be no escape.

Characters move from one place only to be back again to the same place.

Once marriage is accomplished, it leads to a break up that is followed by the same marriage again. Furthermore, the circularity of the text is manifested in the fact that 68

Zrekah it begins with Jude holding water and concludes with Jude crying ―[w]ater—some water‖ (318). The map Hardy provides in his book and the arrangement of the titles of the included parts are two extratextual elements that materially prove the circular development of the text. Characters move from Christminster only to end up ―At

Christminster Again.‖ The coercive circularity confirms that there is no way out.

Phillotson implicitly refers to Christminster as the memeplex responsible for

Sue's radical change. His words are straightforward: ―She's affected by

Christminster sentiment and teaching. I can see her views on the indissolubility of marriage‖ (281). The conventionality, the orthodoxy, the religiosity, and the conservativism of the allegedly and supposedly modern city are oxymoronically auto-toxic. Christminster is the city of crucifixion. Burdened by the hegemonizing

Victorian memes, the characters‘ life and welfare become minor in the process of meme-propagation. The suicidal drive that characters exhibit is one sign of their being memoids. Jude‘s eternal wish, ―that he had never been born,‖ is contagiously reiterated by Sue and applied by Little Father Time (27- 216- 225- 260- 261- 318).

They demonstrate their externally-manufactured gloom through similar suicidal expressions.

The death theme is not limited to Jude. It is already there in Tess of the

D’Urbervilles (1891). The female protagonist of her fictional biography, Tess, dies,

Prince dies, and her baby, Sorrow, also dies. Death keeps approaching Tess till it conquers her in the end. Death becomes a leitmotiv in the two novels. Its high frequency confirms that characters are parts of a mechanism: the meme-mechanism.

The memes make them, control them, and ultimately sacrifice them.

Another form of death is rape. In Jude, a more complicated and dangerous metaphor is employed. Sue suffers a metaphrical rape. Her rapist is her society the

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Zrekah memeplexes of which penetrate forcefully into her consciousness. The circulating memes rape her mentality and tarnish her purity of mind. Jude is sensitive to the process targeting Sue. He begins his concluding soliloquy saying: ―And I here. And

Sue defiled‖ (318 [my italics]). Memes are the soft power that spiritually kills and never misses.

Penny Boumelha analyzes, in her Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (1982), the sexual allusions and the images of metaphorical penetration and pricking presented in Tess. These allusions foreshadow the sexual assault Tess endures and her concluding revenge. Boumelha argues that,

The phallic imagery of pricking, piercing and penetration … serves not only to

create an image-chain linking Tess's experience from the death of Prince to her

final penetrative act of retaliation, but also to satisfy the narrator‘s fascination

with the interiority of her sexuality, and his desire to take possession of her.

(Boumelha, 1982, 120)

Within the hegemonic Victorian ideosphere, the protagonists are subjugated to a memetically-oriented ―groupthink‖ (Janis, 1972). Hence, groupthink operates on two different levels. It corners characters through triggering their sense of alienation. Then it rules over them and integrates them within society. Alienation is a strategy for domestication. Sue is attracted through memetic maneuvers that exploit her unusual circumstances. She seeks alleviation and maybe compensation for her painful loss. She demands protection and immunity from her society believing that it is invincible and under its protection she needs to fear nothing.

Paul ‘t Hart , in his ―Irving L. Janis' Victims of Groupthink‖ (1991), states that ―[c]ohesiveness, viewed […] as the extent of ‗sticking togetherness‘ of members of a group, is one of the crucial factors in group functioning‖ (‘t Hart, 1991, 251-

52). He also asserts that, 70

Zrekah The very cohesiveness of the group may become a value in itself for each of the

members, and to such an extent that they may be reluctant to say or do

anything that might disturb it [...] Furthermore, it may even affect (delimit)

their capacity to think critically. (254)

The phenomenon sounds memetically-oriented. This argument recommends an adequate diagnosis of what Sue suffers towards the end of the novel. She embraces, blindly, the memes of her Victorian ideosphere and loses her critical thinking. She tries to cope with her memosphere by reproducing its memes. The purpose is to avoid raising more social tumult against her. The ultimate success of Memetics is through making the characters reproduce their own submission.

To continue, Sue is in a strong need for ―self efficacy.‖ She fails to resist the memetic contagion when her self-belief is shattered. She loses trust in her decisions as well as in her personal values. Self efficacy, sufficiently explained in Robert S.

Baron‘s paper on the same topic (2005), has to do with a character‘s low self-esteem that reduces and eliminates the appreciation of one‘s personality and urges a dynamic imitation process to take place. It functions as a surrogate that compensates for the loss endured by a character.

The tragedy awakens in Sue fears that undermine her integrity and self- assertion. She starts to doubt her choices and to criticize her own decisions. She surprises Jude by saying: ―I have had dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action. I have thought—that I am still his wife […] Only the thought comes to me‖ (Hardy, 1999, 270 [my italics]). The calamity causes the ultimate infection which leads to imitation, social identification, and conformity. Sue speaks

Memetics without knowing it. She is subjected to an active infection by an active meme. She offers the evidence and the mechanism in her above-mentioned statement. Unfortunately, her critical view fails to provide the proper standard to 71

Zrekah measure her actions. Rather, it appears as the oddity that must be avoided. Critical thinking seems unable to challenge groupthink and Memetics, which marks a real threat for Hardy‘s protagonists. To question decisions is to be free from groupthink.

When Sue stops questioning, she is besieged by a Victorian version of groupthink.

This is a social steel trap that follows the same memetic mechanism.

Memetics marks a savage attack against postulates as identity and humanity.

All personal principles are bulldozed by memes. Social components are thus left as brainless and identity-less entities. This marks a pessimist view denying all aspects of independent thinking, free will, and humanity. None but Hardy can express such pessimism. His writing is generally analyzed as portraying victims of heredity and vicinity. The two addressed notions prevail over characters and demolish their integrity. However, another view signifies a change from Naturalistic victims into memetic vectors and meme-vehicles. The focus changes from one ―v‖ to another

―v.‖ In all cases, characters are replicas of others: predecessors or peers.

In Jude, the non-conforming seems to be the most conforming in his non- conformity. Sue is supposed to be the innovator who has new ideas. Still, she is a replica of the Graduate. Similarly, Jude, the ambitious scholar is memeticized by

Phillotson. In these two paradigms, the two are intellectual victims. The cornerstone is neither the family nor the womb. The focus is on schools, churches, colleges, and society. The irony is that characters are dying to be memeticized.

Even if memes do not come to them, they are ready to run after them.

The immutable and deeply rooted beliefs of Sue turn into a sweeping infection that imposes itself on her at the climax of her tragedy. She experiences a radical self-censorship dictated by the newly internalized memes after she yields to the infectious ideology of her society. Censorship marks one major concept in

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Zrekah Memetics. Ignoring all her previous views of true love and fake marriage, she defines her reattached relation with Phillotson saying: ―I don‘t love him—I must, must, own it, in deepest remorse! But I shall try to love him by obeying him‖ (283).

The power of memes does not crystallize by making characters blend with their ideosphere and go with their society. It manifests itself when they go against themselves. Sue becomes her own ―mind guard‖ and her own police-woman. The polarity of individual-society becomes insignificant and invalid. The Victorian society saves the effort of detaining Sue. She loses her private integrity when she abides by the-imposed and the-accepted as a social norm. She is urged towards imitation pressured by the illusions of ―invulnerability‖ and ―consensus.‖ More concession is always required. No matter how low a character goes, society asks for more; it keeps saying: ―not enough.‖

There is an attempt to categorize Sue as a wild character who has to be domesticated and ―socialized.‖ Her distinctiveness is taken as a negative aspect that must be eliminated. In effect, Sue de-velops what is termed as a ―false consciousness,‖ originally Friedrich Engels‘s term (1893). She becomes a happy vehicle seeing love as sin, and duty as virtue. She limits herself to the strict definition of woman according to the Victorian model.

Francis Heylighen highlights the ―utility factor‖ of a meme in his study of

Memetics (1999). When a particular meme manages to solve a particular problem that its host faces, it is automatically emphasized and reinforced. Sue finds the circulation of religion-related memes helpful in her crisis. Her loss is alleviated when she surrenders to the meme of providential judgment. Gradually, she gets more entangled by these memes and ―want[s] a humble heart; and a chastened mind‖ (Hardy, 1999, 271). At this stage, her belief-space is insufficient to include

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Zrekah contradictory memes. She starts to ―wish her every fearful word and thought could be rooted out of [her] history,‖ stressing exclusively ―[s]elf-renunciation‖ (271).

Terry Eagleton, in his ―The Ideology of the Aesthetic‖ (1988), points out that there exist ―instincts for conformity‖ (329). For him, people have an instinctive tendency towards conformity and orthodoxy. These provide a safe position to avoid the dangers of novelty within any social context. Meme-infection manipulates instincts, weaknesses, and basic needs to guarantee its success and effectiveness.

The objective is to follow social instincts just like insects.

The process targeting Sue can be termed as memetic ideologization. Ideology does not occur suddenly. Lois Tyson defines the term as ―a belief system‖ and adds that, ―all belief systems are products of cultural conditioning,‖ (Tyson, 2006, 56). It is summative of human experience within a particular ideosphere away from any genetic programming. For Todd Gitlin, in his ―Prime Time Ideology‖ (1979), specific social components are responsible for the establishment of ideology. He explains how

Commercial culture does not manufacture ideology; it relays and reproduces and

processes and packages and focuses ideology that is constantly arising from social

elites and from active social groups and movements throughout the society.

(Gitlin, 1979, 253)

This extract stresses the inevitability of ideology. Man is born in ideology. Gitlin, thus, suggests that ideology is the inescapable result of inextricable social relations.

The maturity of this social ―experience‖ will result in what Gitlin calls

―standardized social reality‖ (255). Within this particular social reality, Hardy's characters suffer spiritual and intellectual incarceration. It is not just genetic centrifugal conditioning; it is, more likely, centripetal memeticization. The infection

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Zrekah and the transformation take place from the outside to the inside. Society dwells inside the skull. It resides within the soul and settles in every cell.

As an extension, Gitlin adds that, ―the established social powers have the capacity to colonize consciousness, and unconsciousness, as they see fit‖ (255).

There seems to be a perpetual attempt to domesticate and manage opposition. It is an endeavor to absorb antagonism into ―forms compatible with the core ideological structure‖ (263). He also continues claiming that, ―[c]onsent is managed by absorption as well as by exclusion‖ (263). If Sue is not in, she must be banished out to keep society stable. Ideology is responsible for ironing out differences and wiping out heterogeneity. This is what Eagleton calls, in his ―Ideology, Fiction, Narrative‖

(1979), ―the homogenizing character of ideological discourse‖ (Eagleton, 1979, 64).

The theme of domestication is stressed through the structure of the novel. It is a two-layeristic novel. Hardy establishes his narrative from the very beginning on two levels. He integrates the fauna narrative in the novel to parallel the human narrative. The pigeons Sue keeps symbolize the indicated theme. She gets domesticated in the same way she tames her birds. Sue encages the birds in the same way she is encaged. She keeps them in the same way she is kept. They are circulated in the same way she is circulated. The irony is that, in the end, the birds are set free, and the liberator is not liberated. Sue is encaged forever. She seems more similar to the pig in the first part of the novel. It needs to be disciplined; otherwise, as Arabella says, ―[h]e‘ll be lost‖ (Hardy, 1999, 44).

The objective of the fauna narrative is a zoomorphism of the characters. They are reduced to the level of chattel. Kathleen Blake, in her ―Sue Bridehead: The

Woman of the Feminist Movement‖ (1978), similarly argues that,

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Zrekah Sue is someone who had tried to live by Mill's doctrine- ‗who lets the world, or

his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other

faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.‘ (Blake, 1978, 723)

Oddly enough, with all the energy Sue exhibits to avoid imitation, she succumbs to it in the end. She moves from Mill to the patriarchal mill. ―[I]nstead of being self- creative, [she] is self-destructive‖ (723). Sue becomes the epitome of the ideology of her society, while earlier she has been the incarnation of an absolutely opposite reasoning. She endures the physical and intellectual auto-toxical effect of the

―womanly‖ memeplex. Getting the memetic infection, she ceases to be an emblem of the mind. She becomes a symbol of female subjugation to the authority of her patriarchal society, a patriarchalized woman or an ―honorary man.‖

Sue is born in the wrong society. She is a woman of the spiritual in a world of the material. She is the woman of the ideal in the world of the real. She is the woman of the unconventional in the world of the conventional. The Victorian environment unleashes its weapon of memeticization to break her. In her milieu, the standards, according to which things are judged, are synthetically set with respect to society itself. Proper behavior and the right conduct are artificially designed to suit the principles that constitute the basis of society. The Victorian society decides the values of social integration where the transgression of these values automatically labels a character as a rebel, especially females. In fact, what happens to Sue is not limited to Hardy. It is a leitmotiv in Victorian fiction.

Nonconventional female characters are brought to a compromise with their ideosphere behind a variety of pretexts. Charlotte Bronte‘s famous character, Jane

Eyre, is one expressive example of the converted rebel (1847). She concludes her exceptional fictional autobiography with conventional marriage and wifedom to her decrepit and deformed husband and master. She is ―her own policewoman.‖

76

Zrekah Kathleen Blake quotes Lois Carroll‘s statement that, ―girls have something that they lose in growing up, especially in growing up to be Victorian ladies‖

(Blake, 1978, 709). This observation is illuminating. It parallels Sue‘s desire to ―get back to the life of [her] infancy and its freedom‖ (Hardy, 1999, 111). Growing up, for Victorian women, is ―growing down.‖ Interaction with society causes contamination with definite memes that limit characters and contradict their original traits. The aim is to produce faithful membots who compose the tissue of that society. Sue is pressured to abandon her ―tomboyish‖ memes and meet the standards set by her society exclusively for women. The disagreement between origin and contagion leads necessarily to tragedy.

Gordon S. Haight suggests one example in his introduction illustrating that

―[i]n Erewhon (1872), Samuel Butler‖ pinpoints the most vital aspect of schools at his time. Haight puts this forward in his own words explaining that:

[The] most influential teacher is the professor of Worldly Wisdom, who teaches

[Victorian children] to think like other people. He has done most to suppress

any kind of originality and flunks students for not writing vaguely enough (p.

479). (Haight, 1972, xxxiii).

The focus is on the elimination of originality and spontaneity that lies at the core of the Victorian society. The only thing schools do is to school children. They do not just educate. A school is one of Althusser‘s ideological apparatuses that subject people into acceptable subjects. Schools discipline the rudimentary instincts for creativity and innovation into conformity and renunciation.

Sue, at the peak of her tragedy, logically announces that, ―‗the world and its ways have a certain worth‘‖ (Hardy, 1999, 283). She resigns to a suppressive

―enslavement to forms‖ demonstrating a group-oriented behavior on a personal level (315). The eventual reproduction by Sue is elucidated by Melissa Jenkins in 77

Zrekah her ―Hardy's Palimpsest‖ (2011). Jenkins‘ examination clarifies that, ―[t]rained as an ecclesiastical engraver (her father‗s business), Sue is a force that echoes and re- inscribes past texts rather than a force that truly innovates‖ (Jenkins, 2011, 194 [my italics]). This perception about Sue prepares the ground for a sharp negation of the illusion of innovation in her character divulging a core of in-NO-vation.

Sue is a double-layered character; there is Sue and sub-Sue. Sub-Sue controls and governs Sue. She believes she is free and independent. She does not know that she is doomed by the sub-text. By analysing Sue's behaviors, Jenkins concludes that,

―[i]mitation seems to be inevitable, creeping into all of her supposed statements of rebellion‖ (194). Because imitation is intellectual castration, Sue cannot be an imitator and a discoverer at the same time. She is a re-inscriber who follows and conforms. Imitation deflates her rebellious character. In other words, imitation is a process of de-individualizing and de-revolutionizing. Losing the ability to be different is one of the secrets of social hegemony.

The text provides a perfect occasion to examine how selected personae look upon the non-conforming Jude and Sue. This occurs in ―Part Fifth: At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere.‖ Sue, who is ―sentimentally opposed to the horrors of over- restoration,‖ is involved with Jude in ―the relettering of the Ten Commandments in a little church‖ (Hardy, 1999, 236). The theme of engraving highlights the fact that

Sue is not allowed to be a creator. Although she masters this special and creative profession, she is not given the chance to achieve something out of it. She is a woman banned from accomplishment through a male vocation. Memetically speaking, this episode concretizes the social rejection of non-conforming characters.

Although they are re-inscribing its text, they are condemned as non-hosts of the

Ten-Commandments-memeplex. Society does not reintegrate Sue before her memeticization is complete. It is not enough to be a blind engraver of old texts. 78

Zrekah Faithful internalization of memes is required. Jude and Sue are passive vehicles of the meme. Society is not deluded by passive reproduction. In that radical memepool, memeticization achieves integration.

Even if characters are non-palimpsestic, they become palimpsestic: they are what they are and they are not. They are what they want to be and what society wants them to be. They are subjects and objects, people and puppets. As already quoted, Marx confirms that far from determining existence, consciousness is itself determined by social existence. Consciousness is memeticized as the case of Jude and Sue demonstrates. The couple represents a menace to the social stability of their ideosphere. Memes, however, outweigh the menace, creep into it, and defuse it. The expression of characters‘ individuality is submerged so that it cannot obtain the memetically-contagious quality. Society kills the threat of their quasi-memes. In this manner, they are scapegoats sacrificed for the sake of the social status-quo.

During her revolutionary phase, Sue is a Sisyphean character. She tries hard but every time she rolls the social boulder to the top, she goes back to the bottom to roll it again to the top and back to the bottom again. She eventually weakens and surrenders. By contrast, Arabella appears from the very beginning as a strong meme. She is religiously, socially and quantitively a meme. All her comrades throughout the novel are replicas of her character. Arabella is the successful meme while Sue is the unsuccessful quasi-meme.

Sue‘s retreat to conventionalism happens through continuous contamination.

She retains, throughout the novel, her image as a sexless woman abiding by the prevailing view chaining the women of her time. Detaining sexual fulfilment and her cold response to Jude's intimacies stresses her socially-demanded sexlessness.

Her attitude is not innocent. It is a reproduction of particular memetic premises.

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Zrekah Furthermore, Sue‘s yielding herself to Phillotson repugnantly is a complementation of this ―sexless‖ image. She harmonizes within her the contradictory roles of being a ―sexless wife‖ and a ―sex object‖ for her husband. She is torn between the two sides of an imposed duality. Society wants her to be virtuous and vicious, good and evil, sexless and sex-object.

Sue keeps fluctuating between different attitudes. After all, she knows she cannot live outside society. She suffers from banishment and rejection. She is memeticized by rejection. She becomes a carrier, a membot, hosting the rejection meme. Immediately, she does what a membot does. She rejects what society already rejects: Jude. Her choice is an act of merging into society by reproducing its ratified memes. For this reason, she is forced to adapt to this existence to continue.

Sue‘s intrinsic need for social integration, ironically contributes to her deterioration.

What seems like life for her is her own metaphorical death. What seems the vehicle of survival is suicide for her. In other words, she ceases to exist the moment she thinks she has started to exist.

The union that brings Jude and Sue together is a protective shield against the toxicity of society. It is an attempt to keep them isolated. But they do not know that it is an isolated bubble that only delays their conformity. The couple negligently violate Blackmore‘s ―third step‖ of her Memetic Theory. For a successful imitative process, one should ―mate with the best imitators‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 78). Being with a disastrous imitator exposes the two protagonists to tragedy. The penetrating memes erupt within their consciousness when their weakness invalidates their resistance. Blackmore continues that by mating with the best imitator, ―[one‘s] offspring are more likely to be good imitators and so to acquire all the things that have become important in this newly emerging culture‖ (78).

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Zrekah Meme-propagation dominates the signifier-signified relationship. Memes are able to reinforce the signifier that serves canonization. They also have the power to stamp out the signifier that hinders their transmission. The term, ―New Woman,‖ is a quasi-meme that is denied positive recognition. The disadvantages society attaches to this meme reduce its replicability. They disrupt its circularity, nullify its impact upon potential hosts, and de-canonize it.

The text draws, with a direct reference, a sharp dichotomy between the protagonists and their surroundings. The omniscient narrator with his penetrative eye perceives and depicts how people misunderstand and misread the couple:

The society of Spring Street and the neighbourhood generally did not

understand, and probably could not have been made to understand, Sue and

Jude's private minds, emotions, positions, and fears. (Hardy, 1999, 234)

People cannot tolerate what they cannot comprehend. Their memes blur perception as the narrator stresses. They cannot understand the mentality that rules the private life of the couple. The ambivalence is between the public and the private, the communal and the individual, the conventional and the unconventional.

Sue, in turn, has her own space to voice out her view and determination concerning Christminster. She explains that, ―[a]n intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles‖ (120). Intellects are fake replicas. They are professional membots infected with the memes composing that ideosphere. In her assault on the city, Sue demands an extinction of Christminster memes since she feels tyrannized by their ―sneaking‖ authority at times of low memetic immunity. She states that,

―[t]he mediævalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go‖ (120). Christminster wins the combat and goes nowhere. Its survival is attributed to the power of its memes that stigmatize their targeted hosts

81

Zrekah including the resisting targets. Sue continues her argument using a condemning tone. She attacks the place with a mighty accusation. For her, "[i]t is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers" (120). She is decisive in attributing to the place the flaw of deadly repetition. No wonder, the child Father Time thinks that Christminster colleges are ―gaols‖ (258). Indeed, they are.

D. H. Lawrence argues, when studying Jude, that Sue's ―destruction began only when she said to Jude, ‗I give in.‘‖ (Lawrence, 1936, 503 [1999, 419]). To be more accurate, this episode marks the primary materialization of a long-term memeticization that leads to her eventual destruction. In fact, Sue's conversion is open to multiple readings. For one, Arthur Mizener argues that,

When [Sue] discovered that nature had no raison d'être and that paganism was

false as Christianity had seemed to her, she did not have the strength to face it

and went back to conventional wifehood and conventional Christianity.

(Mizener, 1940-1, 207 [1999, 408])

Lawrence, by contrast, confirms that what looks like her own decision is not really hers. Her decisions are already taken by others. He quite rightly says,

The last act of her intellect was the utter renunciation of her mind and the

embracing of utter orthodoxy, where every belief, every thought, every decision

was made ready for her, so that she did not exist self-responsible. (Lawrence,

1936, 507 [1999, 422])

Decision-making is no more a self-contained process. It depends on a foundation of meme-contagion. Sue loses belief in her personal judgment and surrenders to common thinking. Sue‘s final decision to go back to her first husband, Phillotson, is one manifestation of the effectiveness of the groupthink phenomenon. It denotes

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Zrekah that her methods are seriously altered by her ideosphere. Her decisions are a summary of the collective consciousness dominating her memosphere. Society recruits religion to domesticate her. She feels that the death of her children is a divine punishment, not a corollary of their poverty and social strangulation. Society commits the murder, and the individual is to blame. Memes are ready; the moulds are ready; the social coffins are ready. Everything in Jude seems to be apriori. As

Gillingham says to Phillotson, it is ―a good round tale:‖ the ending is the beginning

(Hardy, 1999, 291). Irving Howe, also, provides a unique analysis viewing Sue as:

promethean in mind but masochist in character; and the division destroys her,

making a shambles of her mind and a mere sterile discipline of her character.

She is all intellectual seriousness, but without that security of will which

enables one to live out the consequences of an idea to their limit. She is all

feminine charm, but without body, without flesh or smell, without femaleness.

(Howe, 1967, 141)

What looks like ―masochism‖ for Howe is one manifestation of the memes of penance and repentance. Sue is torn apart between the new quasi-memes she preferably seeks to reproduce, which are targeted for annihilation from her memetic map, and the ratified memes of her traditional ideosphere, being, even unwillingly, their host and replicator. At this critical phase of her contamination, she fails to cross the stream and drowns into its memetic texture. Steel-traps are all around.

And all efforts towards escape are futile. Death is the only comfort.

Haight points out that, ―the surface of respectability the Victorians presented was often only a protective convenience covering feelings and conduct not unlike our own‖ (Haight, 1972, xi [my italics]). Here is the fake façade the Victorian people had to grow over their skin in order to achieve social homogeneity leading and a convenient life. He suggests rightfully that the Victorian ―respectability,‖ 83

Zrekah Christianity, and morality protected the citizens from the centripetal power applied by society to the non-conformists. Commitment to this fake image, by the cultivation of its specific memes, is the defensive method that provides a bait towards surrendering to memeticization. Furthermore, the assumed ―protection‖ is an effective hook that supports and recommends continuous circulation. In this way, characters feel indebted to society. They start recruiting new agents and polluting fresh blood. They cease to be self-contained characters and become tragic caricatures of lost selves collapsing under the demoralizing effect which the social memes apply to them.

The critic Albert Guerard confirms that Sue's character dramatizes ―both isolated neurosis and neurosis as the product of social forces‖ (Guerard, 1949, 112).

This diagnosis of her character echoes one of Aaron Lynch‘s memetic notions. He suggests that, ―a meme actively sways the emotional receptivity of newly exposed nonhosts‖ (Lynch, 1996, 108). From a different perspective, Howe, also, accurately elaborates on how

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the situation of women changed

radically: from subordinate domesticity and Victorian repression to the first

signs of emancipation, leading often enough to the poignant bewilderment of a

Sue Bridehead. (137)

Works of art are meme-loaded. Writers, themselves, are manipulated membots playing the role of meme-transmitting machines. Kate Millett, in her Sexual Politics

(2000), argues that,

It is difficult to understand whether Sue is the victim of circumstances,

principally those of her own social indoctrination and stronger than any truth

that she might acquire on her own, or the victim of a cultural literary

convention. (Millett, 2000, 133)

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Zrekah Sue seems doubly victimized. She cannot, and is not allowed to, comprise spirituality and sexuality. Memetics is thus both extratextual and intertextual. Even

Hardy is weighed down by the dominant literary memes.

Beside the literary memes that coerce the writer, the Victorian memes also collide to adjust Hardy's writing attitude. Norman Page highlights, in his ―Preface to the First Edition‖ of Jude, the modification Hardy had to do to avoid public resentment towards his initial serial text. The writer revises his manuscript and excludes the unsocial occurrences that contradict the Victorian memes. Page affirms how

[T]he serial version was ―abridged and modified‖ from what Hardy had

written; these changes, which can be traced in the manuscript and involved (in

R. L. Purdy‘s words) an ―amazing sacrifice of art and credibility,‖ were made

in response to objections from the editor of the magazine, who had protested

that the treatment of Jude's relationships with Arabella and Sue was unsuitable

for a family periodical. (Hardy, 1999, viii)

In a sense, Hardy seems to be infected with the Victorian memes that control his ideoshpere. He is one host who cannot defy memes‘ authority and has no choice but to reproduce them.

Daniel Defoe‘s Moll Flanders (1722) is a clear example of the governing literary conventions. The most unconventional character, Moll, is rewarded, at the end, by conventionality. She ends up as a happy slave following a particular pattern and leading ―a good round tale.‖ She flies but to land and rebels only to obey. After all, the writer is a man infected with a patriarchal meme. He is every male.

It is clear, thus, that the raison d’être of Sue's tragedy is not exclusively biological. Her trouble is a question of mistiming: living in the wrong time and

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Zrekah consequently, the wrong ideosphere. She is ―ahead‖ of her time. Indeed, society is always ―behind‖ women. It is constantly busy taming and domesticating them into humble dependents. This point seems to develop into a leitmotif. A woman is a misfit who is stereotyped and pruned into a ―subject.‖ To be a woman is to be an exile. The metaphorical campaign against social conventions is left unfulfilled. Sue abandons her principles in the middle of her fight against her dominating memepool. The power of memes homogenizes what is originally heterogeneous.

Sue fails and society prevails.

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Zrekah F. Negating the Power of Negation:

We do not speak language. “Language speaks us.” (Heidegger, 2001)

The psychological dichotomy of Sue's consciousness changes radically dramatizing her traumatized self. She exhibits particular linguistic and psychoanalytic manifestations that provide signs towards her memetic transformation. The labyrinthine construction of Sue's consciousness is the corollary of her painful awareness of her uniqueness within her memepool. She feels the danger of maintaining an ―antagonistic‖ attitude towards the social conventions. Sometimes she is for, sometimes she is against, a foreshadowing of her radical regression into an invertebrate woman of convention.

This chapter highlights the developing elements that characterize the protagonists and are not essentially parts of their original self. Meme-infection is an open operation. It crosses all the boundaries of family, gender, class, religion, society, country, and ethnicity. It justifies all the powerful drifts that occur irrespective of all the above-mentioned demarcations.

Besieged between two conflicting memepools, Sue is torn towards terrible tragedy. She lives confined within the Victorian memepool with all its memes of conservatism, conventionality, and religiosity that ambush her and stifle her rebellious spirit. On the other hand, being well-read, Sue is exposed to the bookish memes which inject her with their liberal, atheist, and revolutionary memotype.

Her consciousness, thus, is the arena for all these conflicting memes.

According to this categorization, Sue goes through three stages of memetic contagion. She lives at first according to her own quasi-memes, the un-Victorian memes, free from any memetic complexities. Accepting to marry Phillotson, which entails committing herself to the wife-role, marks one slip into the membotic mode 87

Zrekah where her behavior is her primary tool for meme propagation. Sue, repeatedly, slips into meme-conformity unawares. Particular occurrences drive her into memetic slumber. The sudden presence of little Father Time stirs in her the mother memeplex, which re-channels her thinking in a preset direction. She exclaims to

Jude after their first meeting with the child: ―we must pluck up courage, and get that ceremony over […] It is no use struggling against the current, and I feel myself getting intertwined with my kind‖ (Hardy, 1999, 219). Her words unveil her infection. She is entangled by enchantment and ambushed by allurement. Still, her will of mind brings her over the immersion level and retrieves her into her uninfected state. She undoes her act and negates her conventional thought, thus emphasizing a reverberating character of memetic-ups-and-downs.

Until the end of the text, Sue‘s volatile character shows that her memeticization is not fully accomplished. She has the will and the individual awareness to resist its hegemony over her. She has the willpower to fight against the female-fragility meme and avoid complete meme contagion. She rebels against the memetic power when she realizes how it oppresses her. However, the final stage of her memetic infection marks a fully-controlled Sue by the inescapable memetic burden. Although full memeticization is unavoidable, it is ironically represented as salvation not damnation to facilitate the metamorphization.

Juxtaposing the beginning with the end is the best technique to identify the change in the construction of characters. The first time Sue speaks, her language is direct and expressive. She initiates her verbal course in the text with a powerful and declarative statement of absolute negation. She imperatively addresses Jude with deep determination, ―I am not going to meet you just there, for the first time in my life! Come further on‖ (81 [my italics]). She adds, ―[w]hat I meant was that the place you chose was so horrid … I mean gloomy and inauspicious in its associations‖ 88

Zrekah (82). She is unabashed and self-assertive. Her language represents her as a decision- maker, a powerful speaker, and an independent woman. Furthermore, aunt

Drusilla‘s account of her early ―mischievousness‖ reports very audacious remarks uttered by Sue. Once, she addresses her saying, ―[m]ove on, aunty. This is no sight for modest eyes‖ (90). Her statements demonstrate that she is not a conventional

Nineteenth-Century woman.

The same scene reveals a further unique quality characterizing Sue. The narrator exclaims how ―[s]he looked him up and down curiously, though Jude did not look much at her‖ (82). The rare dare with which she faces Jude, who is still a stranger to her, is noteworthy. Her approach discloses an individual personality that lies outside the dominant ―fashion‖ of her day. She is the subject and he is the object. She gazes and he is gazed at. She disregards his gender, class, and the

―logical‖ lack of familiarity between them and crushes all the separating social barriers between them. Sue, through this reversal of roles and the undoubted feminist orientation, is introduced as the promising New Woman, the rebellious feminist unaffected by communal quagmire.

By contrast, the concluding episode in Sue's story bubbles over with many opposing implications. The saga of defiance and mutiny concludes with a most conformist attitude on the part of Sue. Her language and physiognomy mirror the intrinsic change occurring by memetic means. The anticlimactic submission in her final statement, ―[y]es. It is my duty!‖ negates negation (313). Her slave-oriented articulation undoes a life of free will. Her power of refusal is memetically invalidated. The hosting of Victorian memes, under her incarcerating conditions, overwhelms Sue and appears through extrinsic manifestations: verbal and physical.

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Zrekah The narrator relates the scene of Sue's surrender saying that Phillotson ―led her through the doorway, and lifting her bodily, kissed her,‖ where her reaction to his intimacies is embodied in ―[a] quick look of aversion [that] passed over her face, but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry‖ (313). After the direct, though imposed, resignation to a ―dutiful‖ life by taking in all the memes constructing it and reproducing them, she resigns to silence. Languageless-ness is the canonized language for women. It is the meme of mute suffering targeting female hosts.

Characters keep trying to slough off their skin and get rid of the haunt. But, their efforts are negated. Instead of being suppressed, Sue suppresses herself; instead of being conventionalized, she conventionalizes herself. This marks the ideal memeticization. The membot and memoid become one. She stresses her infection by stressing the theme of duty saying, ―I am going to make my conscience right on my duty to Richard—by doing a penance—the ultimate thing. I must" (310 [my italics]). Sue‘s duty discourse seems unSue-like. The silence-under-patriarchal oppression, with which Sue concludes her role in the text, defines, wordlessly, the process to which Sue is subject throughout the text. The female-sacrifice-meme inhabits her until its control is complete over her. She experiences a sweeping transformation from the liberal ―I lust‖ to the conformist ―I must.‖

In spite of all her counter quasi-memes, Sue gets infected by the pre-set memplexes of her overwhelming Victorian memepool. In fact, the activation of the silence-meme within Sue is initiated after the first wedding ceremony is fulfilled.

The internalization of one meme, the marriage meme, facilitates the internalization of related co-memes that reinforce its authority. Her new situation, as a married woman, compels her to abiding by particular co-memes, the wifedom memeplex.

There and then, she faces Jude with many conflicting thoughts within her, due to her conflicting memes. The reader observes how ―her lips parted as if she were 90

Zrekah going to avow something. But she went on; and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken‖ (140). The wifedom memeplex wins the internal struggle within Sue who pays her lover a silent farewell as a dutiful wife would do.

The most eminent meme within the wifedom memeplex is the angel-in-the- house meme. Besides being a literary meme coined by Coventry Patmore in his narrative poem of the same title (1854), ―the angel in the house‖ is the meme that determines all ―womanly‖ attributes canonized in the Victorian tradition. It ideologizes the Victorian women so that they abide by the demanded images of subordination, sacrifice, and sweetness. Indeed, the best example of what George

Orwell calls ―doublespeak,‖ in his 1984 (1949), is the ―angel.‖ Angel does not indicate positive angelic aspects. It has a cornucopia of meanings. This surplus of meaning is the quintessence of Heidegger‘s epitaphic statement above. The angel imagery signifies that the woman is a slave, a sacrifice, and a subordinate. She is a victim of the patriarchal regime, which uses such euphemism to cover up its thirst for control. Society uses this deceptive language and calls slavery a duty, and the serf an angel. The term ―angel‖ marks one satanic word. Still, the woman gladly enjoys playing the angelic role.

Sue thinks she is speaking language. She does not realize that language is speaking her. She thinks that she means an attractive principle. She does not realize that she is saying what she does not mean. She is a membot of the dangerous euphemism of society. Sue's ―duty‖ and ―must‖ stand for servitude and submission.

Sue becomes a happy slave, ready to reproduce her own slavery.

The ideal ―angelic‖ image of woman, with the above-discussed aspects of the concept, is memetically defined and contagiously transmitted. Virginia Woolf provides a vivid description of a metaphysical incarnation of the-angel-in-the-house

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Zrekah meme in her ―Professions for Women‖ (1931). Her account of the ghost of the angel, which continually seeks to haunt her, is that,

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly

unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself

daily […] in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of

her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of

others. Above all […] she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief

beauty — her blushes, her great grace. (1931)

Woolf rereads language, she unmasks the covert filth hiding behind the overt semantic wealth. She continues, ―I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. Had I not killed her she would have killed me.‖ The angel kills the woman. And, the only way to survive is to kill the angel. Arabella says,

―pigs must be killed‖ (Hardy, 1999, 54). For Woolf, angels must be killed. She kills the epitome of the ―angel‖ and gets free of her incarcerating effect. Woolf kills the meme and tries to initiate the counter-meme of killing-the-angel-in-the-house.

In her study of communication training for women from a sociolinguistic perspective, ―Verbal Hygiene for Women: Linguistics Misapplied‖ (1994), Deborah

Cameron coins a new term, ―verbal hygiene.‖ It means that, ―some ways of using language are functionally, aesthetically, or morally preferable to others‖ (Cameron,

1994, 383). Cameron continues by identifying a ―stereotype of ‗feminine‘ speech‖ that is confined to the private domestic sphere, with a concentration on

―[cultivating] the art of listening‖ (383). This stereotype is based as well on

―[avoiding] any display of wit, erudition, coarseness, or aggression‖ (383). A radical Victorian version of Cameron's ―women language‖ is memetically downloaded within Sue. It is characterized specifically as, ―less forceful and direct‖

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Zrekah in Cameron's perspective (386). This linguistic-oriented meme emphasizes a related co-meme, the angel meme.

Language is in need for disinfection. A close reading definitely shows that it needs ―hygienization.‖ Neutral words are biased and clean words are contaminated. A woman is unable to survive in this atmosphere of delusion and falsity where every word is a trap and every meaning is booby-trapped. Language is not neutral. It is always someone‘s language, mostly Patriarchy‘s. The strategy of the patriarchal society works by normalizing the abnormal and neutralizing the biased. This social maneuver stresses the need for hygienizing language and decontaminating it from its androcentric contamination that lies at the heart of

Cameron‘s ―verbal hygiene.‖

By being ―flattened out,‖ Sue is subject to what Cameron calls a ―sex-role- socialization:‖ a process that interconnects a female‘s integration within society with, ironically, de-socialization (385). According to this pattern, Sue loses her social competence, relapsing from an advanced state of profound affiliation with the opposite sex into a woman of reticent social relations. Her independence and open- mindedness dissolve under the oppression of social ideology. On the linguistic level,

Sue abandons the sophisticated and elevated use of ―neutral language‖ which is usually ―used by men, and by some women sometimes,‖ as Cameron explains. She starts using ―women‘s language‖ which is for the linguist, a ―marked register used by women,‖ as opposed to the more-radically feminist ―womanspeak,‖ Toril Moi‘s concept ([386] and [Moi, 1985]).

Sue becomes under-lexicalized. At the climax of her falsely-liberal life, she seems equal to Jude, the educated male. An analysis of her messages to him would show that she quotes the same sources and philosophizes about her views the same

93

Zrekah way he does in his messages. She seems to be a female Jude in her discourse. No womanly language is used at this stage. However, the language of her anticlimactic phase is characterized by its simple, unsophisticated, and womanly style. She is infected with the language designed for women by her patriarchal memepool. The drastic change in Sue‘s verbal production parallels an alteration in her memetic make-up. The impossibility of language hygienization leads to the impossibility of meme-immunization.

Internalizing specific Victorian memes of womanly virtues, mainly the-angel- in-the-house meme, in Sue‘s consciousness exteriorizes in her verbal utterances.

When Sue tries to avoid the gender trap by debiologizing herself, society rebaptizes, regenders, and rebiologizes her by its memetic institutions, the school, the college, and the Church. Authenticating the illusion that it has been there, inside, all the time is the main objective of the social mechanism.

In a later meeting between Sue and Jude, the narrator prioritizes the schism that befalls the two after Sue's marriage. The narrator states that the fact, ―[t]hat

Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled ‗Phillotson,‘ paralyzed Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an individual‖ (Hardy, 1999, 150 [my italics]).

The domestication memeplex strips Sue of her individuality. Consequently, she loses the attribute of free communication. Jude realizes that Sue, with her ethereal character, is still there. He tries to liberate her from her memetic shell; he seeks to trigger the embers under the ashes confirming to her with strong belief that,

No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson … you are dear, free Sue Bridehead, only you

don‘t know it! Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast

maws as an atom which has no further individuality. (151 [my italics])

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Zrekah Sue is no more a person. Her infection atomizes her. She becomes an ―atom‖ that directly connote to dehumanization and reification. In Jude, memeticization boils down characters into the tiniest particles. They are reduced into atoms with no will, momentum, or even self-conscious movement. They follow the circular movement decided for them where they are magnetized by society.

The social memes are keen on the de-etheralization of the ethereal. At this stage of her memetic hypnosis, Sue slips into a deeper state of meme infection.

During the Mrs.-Phillotson-phase, Sue exhibits signs that prove her meme contagion. The internalization of female-viciousness and necessary-self-blame memes is foregrounded in her own discourse. Their communication asserts their actively-contagious quality. She unveils her feelings before Jude asserting that, ―[i]f

I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness; not that I should have a right to dislike [Phillotson]!‖ (167 [my italics]). Being a membot of her conservative ideosphere, Sue denies herself the right to have feelings. Irrespective of her distinct intellect, Sue blames the woman, herself, and her ―wickedness.‖

The patriarchal society is based on the meme that man is good and woman is evil. The woman-wickedness memeplex is among the most ancient memeplexes, going back to the beginning of time; from Pandora to Lilith to Eve to Deianira to

Delilah to Clytemnestra to Xanthippe to Sue. The repetition of the ―wickedness‖ justification by Sue confirms her deep infection and emphasizes her membotic function. She reiterates with blind belief that, ―there is nothing wrong except my own wickedness‖ (168). Her infection pulls her down; she slips from the wide celestial to the wicked terrestrial: auto-toxicity par excellence.

One of Sue's memetic-downs is detected before the model of Jerusalem. On this occasion, Sue's mind demonstrates its liberty and distinction. She does not take

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Zrekah for granted what others blindly believe. Her expression of her dissatisfaction with the ever-transmitted Jerusalem meme and its Christian connotations displays her nonconforming spirit which hinders her infection with the suggested meme:

‗I fancy we had enough of Jerusalem … considering we are not descended from

the Jews. There was nothing first-rate about the place, or people, after all—as

there was about Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and other old cities.‘ (87)

The extract suggests that religion and its associations seem to be no exception for

Sue's doubtful and negating character. The competition among memes to fill the limited belief-space of Sue is won, at this stage; by a specific repertoire of memeplexes derived from selected texts and comprehensive readings. They overcome the intruding memes that contradict their memotype of contradiction.

The negative attitude, which characterizes Sue‘s viewpoint, is uncommon in her

Victorian memepool. Nevertheless, these quasi-memes die out when she fails to play their successful propagating membot. Ironically, she becomes the membot of contrary prevailing memes. Sue does not labor to propagate the memes she hosts so that they are beaten by the publicly circulated memplexes, which oppose hers.

However, the related episode is not a complete ―memetic down.‖ Even with full resistance against the internalization of the Jerusalem memeplex, Sue, the teacher, transmits the memeplex with all its religious co-memes to the little ones under her supervision at school. Instead of spreading what she believes in, she plays the faithful medium through which the verified memes constituting most of her ideosphere are spread to new hosts. The narrator relates that, ―on looking on the blackboard in Sue's class, Phillotson was surprised to find upon it, skillfully drawn in chalk, a perspective view of Jerusalem, with every building shown in its place‖

(88). Memes manipulate their replication through every possible vector. Sue needs none but the memeplex itself to urge reproduction within non-hosts, even a membot 96

Zrekah is unnecessary. Propagating the meme is indicative in that it underlines an active infection where the membot, Sue, is urged to transmit the meme to non-hosts.

Irrespective of her will, Sue dutifully spreads the meme among her pupils. This marks one elementary sign towards her irrefutable subjugation to memes beyond any ability for resistance.

Moreover, this episode stresses a serious notion. Although most readings consider that Jude is a parent-child novel, it is technically a teacher-student novel.

The foundation of the narrative is not family. It is a variety of memetic institutions: schools, colleges, and churches. The movement of characters is not simply from house to house. They keep moving from one school to another where schools are unlimited memepools. They are cultural institutions that do not submit to biological laws. They are places for replicating memes. Within these memepools, vital changes occur in the learners‘ characters. Here, the changes are not genetic; they are definitely memetic. Children at the Victorian schools take into their rudimentary consciousness whatever memes are impregnated within their courses. Learning is a receptive mode of meme infection where learners, willingly, open up to new memes the memotype of which may contradict their personal views and convictions.

Schools, with their corollary meme-infection and strategic indoctrination, represent the cornerstone in character construction.

Richard Brodie suggests a dangerous question concerning the educational system. He asks, ―[c]an we consciously choose a better purpose for education than simply pumping our children‘s minds full of memes?‖ (Brodie, 2009, 224). The

Training College, with all its routines and disciplines, seeks to mould the young women by spreading among them the memes of proper behavior for women. The narrator portrays them in their sleeping cubicles drawing attention to the similarity

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Zrekah invoked within them even in sleep. They are replicas of a model constructed upon

Victorian memes:

[T]hey all lay in their cubicles, their tender feminine faces upturned to the

flaring gas-jets which at intervals stretched down the long dormitories, every

face bearing the legend "The Weaker" upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein

they were moulded. (Hardy, 1999, 112)

The danger is exaggerated due to the biological orientation of the narrative. The girls are transformed into memoids. They are infected by means of direct teaching.

They are taught ―The Weaker‖ legend through reinforced propagation. Although the narrative reorients the attention of the reader from the memetic theme into the biological one, the infection process can be still detected. The ―legend‖ of female dependence and fragility is a memeplex, with an organic and genetic memotype, that the patriarchal regime keeps circulating among women.

The Training College episode explicitly lays its memetic burden on Sue. Her physical make-up is re-constructed according to the memes inhibiting the college ideosphere. Sue is represented, as she comes forward to meet Jude, as having

―altogether the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline‖ (105). Sue's mind is not fully memeticized at this stage of the text. Her infection is realized on the level of her external form and clothing. Sue's massive change is initiated by this exterior transformation. She is introduced to the reader through the narrator‘s description: ―Though she had been here such a short while, she was not as he had seen her last. All her bounding manner was gone; her curves of motion had become subdued lines‖ (105). Although Sue only stays for a short while in the Training

College, she shrinks during this sharp and shocking experience. The words used to portray her are remarkable with what submission they imply. Her ―curves,‖ which

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Zrekah signify the human, emotional, and dynamic dimensions of her character, are transformed into ―subdued lines,‖ which symbolize dehumanization, the passivity of women, and their subjugation under patriarchal authority.

Sue‘s reflection after she wakes from her slumber on Jude's couch, ―I ought not to be here, ought I?‖ reveals primary signs of memetic infection (117). By crossing the river, Sue is completely immersed accomplishing a metaphorical memetic baptism. She thinks she is performing a revolutionary crossing where in fact, she experiences a counter-crossing; going back to the implicit Christian conventions loaded in the symbolism of the event. She affirms her ―sneaking‖ memetic infection by confirming how,

At times one couldn‘t help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old

faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple

sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt,

‗O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!‘ (120)

The extract stresses the nostalgia Sue feels for the early times. She quotes a masculine head rhyme of Swinburne, rejuvenating the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition. She feels estranged from her earlier self which intrigues a feeling of longing. It is ironic to declare that the clarity of Sue‘s mind is emphasized at her sad moments when, technically, this clarity is contronymous with the sad moments in her life. The loss of her logic is triggered by the most tragic experience that faces her. The loss of her children is the critical event unleashing a most hypnotic memetic effect. At the peak of her tragedy lies the peak of her memetic infection.

The paradox reveals the latent memes and their powerful impact.

Sue represents the dilemma of adopting an original mannerism. When imploring her husband, Phillotson, to liberate her of the bond that eternally unites

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Zrekah them, she argues explaining that, "[i]f people are at all peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very rules that produce comfort in others!‖ (176). She is aware of the conflict that distresses her involvement with her society. Moreover, she is conscious of the suffering awaiting her. Still, she cannot avoid it. Here lies the essence of her tragedy. Characters‘ knowledge of the raison d’être of their misfortunes is futile. It cannot negate, or even alleviate, the imminent adversities.

The awareness of being ―eccentric‖ facilitates Sue‘s meme contagion and her eventual conformity. According to Brodie, the realization of nonconformity leads to interconnected realizations of the necessity of conformity. He argues that,

When people get immersed in a culture with strong new memes, it tends to be a

sink-or-swim proposition. Either you change your mind, succumbing to peer

pressure and adopting the new memes as your own or you struggle with the

extremely uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by people who think you’re crazy or

inadequate. (Brodie, 2009, 28 [my italics])

The stress caused by this uncomfortable feeling of inadequacy and eccentricity leads necessarily to unquestioned conformity. It engenders the required identification with the mainstream memes developing a conforming false consciousness. Herbert

Marcuse argues that, ―[t]his identification is not illusion but reality,‖ and continues with a more dangerous observation that, ―the ‗false consciousness‘ [...] becomes the true conscious‖ (Marcuse, 1964, 19). The result of this conformity is unconscious and irresistible memeticization.

Sue condemns her environment in her dialogue with Arabella. She denounces the city that denounces her, uncovering the hypocrisy of the ―City of Light.‖ For her, the retrograded spirit of the allegedly revolutionary place stinks. Sue indirectly identifies the hyperreal image of the enlightened territory pointing it out as a fake

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Zrekah representation. She criticizes Jude's view of the city, ―He still thinks it a great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is, a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition‖ (Hardy, 1999,

246 [my italics]). Sue's awareness of the phoniness of her environment is an important justification for excommunicating her as an exile. Sue‘s deep comprehension necessitates her reform by memeticization.

Aaron Lynch argues for the existence of a ―Male dominance meme‖ and a

―Female subservience meme‖ (Lynch, 1996, 66). The track of these two memes is observable in Jude. The only thing Sue comes to express is agreement and consent, being reduced and swept by the effect of the above-mentioned co-memes. She loses her argumentative and resisting personality. Her attitudes reflect a submissive

―Yes‖ while deep, within her, is buried a drastic ―No.‖ She is stripped of her exceptional capacity to resist, refuse and refute mimicry. Instead of continuing to represent, what Marcuse calls, the ―Great Refusal,‖ Sue turns into a passive vassal in a phallocentric society that considers women as chattel.

After the accomplishment of his relationship with Sue, Jude is given space to define her as being out-of-current-time. The loftiness of her discourse urges the following reply on his part:

Sue, you seem when you are like this to be one of the women of some grand

old civilization … rather than a denizen of a mere Christian country. I almost

expect you to say at these times that you have just been talking to some friend

whom you met in the Via Sacra, about the latest news of Octavia or Livia; or

have been listening to Aspasia's eloquence. (Hardy, 1999, 213)

Sue's character stands for the ethics of the ―higher culture,‖ opposition, and antagonism until she is ―flattened out‖ and ―liquidated‖ (Marcuse, 1964, 60). Sue is the ultimate subject until subjected. 101

Zrekah The point emphasized by Cameron, and detected in Sue's situation, is the concept of ―assertiveness.‖ An assertive character is male-like. To be normal, Sue is forced to discard her assertiveness in discourse and demeanor. She loses her super- ordination to become a subordinate among many others. To become socially incorporated, Sue‘s ―individuality‖ has to be obliterated. Cameron, also, points out that, ―men are taken as the universal norm‖ (Cameron, 1994, 392). The linguist continues summarizing the dilemma of the Victorian woman when she proposes that, ―it seems women are damned (for incompetence) if they act the way women are meant to act, and equally damned (for unfemininity) if they do not‖ (393). They are damned if they do and damned if they do not. Women are sadly stuck between the Scylla of woman memes and helpless femininity and the Charybdis of the non- woman memes and stigmatized eccentricity.

Sue seems aware of the compelling memes installed into women‘s consciousness, especially the meme of virtue. She assertively declares before Jude,

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them […]

almost as one of their own sex […] I have not felt about them as most women

are taught to feel—to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue. (Hardy,

1999, 117-18 [my italics])

The meme of transgressing the ―universal norm‖ needs to be eliminated before being canonized. It is weighed down by the dominant memes of social and gender classifications of femininity and masculinity. Brodie explains how memes govern their hosts. He stresses that, ―ideas sometimes own people. And ideas are made up of memes‖ (Brodie, 2009, 25). A man is an idea while a woman is only a margin.

Through her declaration, Sue self-consciously excludes herself from the communal programming by meme-infection. However, the exclusion does not last long.

102

Zrekah The social map displays that society is bedeviled by boundaries, borders, and barriers. No character is allowed to cross especially upwards. Crossing is a curse that obliterates all sense of belonging. The irony is that most characters dream of transgressing these limitations. Jude, Arabella, and even Phillotson die to cross but they find themselves back in the same spot. Most importantly, Sue is by definition: a crosser. The novel repeatedly demonstrates that society is on the alert. Anyone who tries to cross will be crossed out.

Most memes get transmitted through verbal exchanges. Thus, besides being a powerful meta-meme, language represents a meme-problem. People lie under the linguistic authority that allows language to make us and memeticize us being memetically defined as a meme-pool. Deeper still, it is a meme-womb from which, and in which, memes emerge and develop. The hegemonic membots rewrite language to serve the aim of meme-propagation. They use language as a memeplex which, beside human vehicles, is the mighty medium for meme dissemination.

Blackmore addresses the issue: ―memes that can get themselves spoken will (in general) be copied more often than those that cannot. So these kinds of memes will spread in the meme pool‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 84). By contrast, the unwanted memes are suppressed; their carriers are muted, or their expressions are eliminated from the linguistic memepool. By deleting the word, the meme is deleted.

To achieve proper recognition and adequate propagation, memes need powerful verbal articulations that guarantee more enthusiastic circulation.

Individual behaviors and convictions cannot give the right momentum to a memeplex that is not even recognized as such. The flirt-meme, a dominant negative one during the Victorian era, has the required recognition as a self-conscious meme.

Accordingly, being encoded in the memetic make-up of its hosts is an easy process that is accomplished perfectly even in those who have the counter memes 103

Zrekah constituting the ―New-Woman‖ memeplex. Despite his being the closest person to her inner self, Jude condemns Sue with his shocking accusation, ―I sometimes think you are a flirt‖ (Hardy, 1999, 161). The flirt-meme, the title of which is most distributed, is stronger than his knowledge of, and love for, Sue. The memetic competition within his mind is won by the more addressed meme rather than the strange and non-conceptual quasi-meme. Sue's seeks to be the incarnation of a memeplex that is not yet identified under the name ―New Woman.‖

The clash between the covert and overt memes explains Sue‘s Janus-faced behavior. For example, she acknowledges to Jude at Melchester that, ―[Phillotson] is the only man in the world for whom [she has] any respect or fear‖ (123).

Immediately, she comes to negate her confession by a counter one. She exclaims haughtily, ―I don‘t care for him! He may think what he likes—I shall do as I choose‖ (123). At this stage, she labors to avoid the ongoing infection exhibiting her resisting spirit by negating its effectual reproduction. Her aspiration to the ―almost neutral‖ gender representation, D. H. Lawrence‘s term, is aborted by the will of the meme (Lawrence, 1936). No matter how hard she tries to resist, memes invade her thinking and decide her life for her.

Sue hyper-reads the conditions determining the perspective that influences how other characters observe the couple. She criticizes the ―animal-desire‖ meme arguing for a more possible metaphysical relation between a man and a woman:

As to our going on together … in a sort of friendly way, the people round us

would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and

woman are limited as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their

philosophy only recognizing relations based on animal desire. The wide field of

strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored

by them. (Hardy, 1999, 134)

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Zrekah Sue's argument sounds critical of her society. She displays the normal-for-it expressing her dissatisfaction with it. Still, she cannot avoid abiding by its dominant memes. She is not reacting to these memes. She is abiding by their authority as a pretext to undermine her ―improper‖ attachment to Jude. What exactly goes on inside her is a process of dislodging her private convictions and replacing them by the pre-established memes along a tough competition course.

Both, Jude and Sue, get married to ―prevent scandal‖ which represents an important common meme within their Victorian memepool. The same scandal meme is underlined by Sue. She says addressing Phillotson,

you know what scandals were spread, and how I was turned out of the training

School … and this frightened me, and it seemed then that the one thing I could

do would be to let the engagement stand. Of course I, of all people, ought not

to have cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care for.

But I was a coward—as so many women are—and my theoretic

unconventionality broke down. (Hardy, 1999, 175-6)

Jude, in turn, is judgmental towards Sue pointing at her fluctuating approach. His language has an accusing tone, ―I‘ve sometimes thought, since your marrying

Phillotson because of a stupid scandal, that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know‖ (191 [my italics]).

Jude's analysis identifies two Sues; one is real, the other is unreal. However, here, an important question urges itself before the reader. Is it only affectation and simulation or something beyond them? The strategic development of events recalls one technique of Psychological realism; putting characters to the test. Being at risk uncovers the hidden abysses of each character. It raises deeper issues such as: Is Sue a real Sue? Is she a technical representation of a ―simulacrum‖ of everybody around

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Zrekah her? The danger of this point manifests when the image becomes the truth. The image becomes the origin, and Sue becomes anti-Sue.

Jude is an honest man looking for an icon of authenticity. His tragedy is the outcome of his indulgence with two icons of artificiality: Arabella of affectation and

Sue of simulation. Arabella is a great simulatress in the jungle of simulation. Sue is reprogrammed towards Arabellization. This dramatic coup d'état begs for an explanation. Behind the scene, lies the meme. The irony is that, Sue, who condemns Arabella, comprises inside her another Arabella.

Memes overwhelm the couple so that they are completely unaware of the deeply rooted memetic conformity. They believe their explicit rebellion. Their implicit infection, however, is signaled by their running away, twice, to where they are ―unknown‖ so that they are ―lighter hearted‖ (Hardy, 1999, 235). Being strangers at Aldbrickham, they can achieve social integration provided that they simply, in turn, host the dominant memes again and abide by simulation. They think that by escaping, they are escaping repression. But, they manifest a double toxicity. Furthermore, Sue brings to the light the dormant memes within her when she answers Jude's suggestion, while on the train of their escape, that:

―It may not work so well for us as if he had been less kind, and you had run

away against his will.‖ murmured Jude.

―That I never would have done.‖ (188)

Sue‘s refusal to act without her husband‘s agreement enlightens the reader concerning the progression of her memetic contagion. Memes inhibit people irrespective of what they want, think or aspire. She seeks to work by her mind‘s will. But her mind is already haunted by the wifedom-memeplex against which she

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Zrekah keeps fighting. Brodie argues for the same notion asserting that, ―your thoughts are not always your own original ideas. You catch thoughts—you get infected with them, both directly from other people and indirectly from viruses of the mind‖

(Brodie, 2009, xiv). Although Brodie‘s words sound great, an opposite argument sounds even greater. Characters do not seem to catch thoughts. Thoughts catch them. This suggestion embodies an annihilation of human identity and an undermining of all the ethics of Humanism. Humans are mindless and identity-less carriers of memes. Memeticization murders identity.

The meme of ―unsuccessful marriage‖ is implanted within the two protagonists determining their lives and deciding their destinies. Their lives are led according to the ethics of this meme saying that they are part of ―[a] peculiar family—the wrong breed for marriage‖ (Hardy, 1999, 134). The biological orientation of this meme magnifies its vigor. The meme haunts the couple beyond expulsion. It goes through their veins and settles in their latent intellect. The narrator shows how

They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an

assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would have

meant a terrible intensification of unfitness—two bitters in one dish. (134)

It is a thought disguised under genetic façade. Here lies the danger of memes. When a meme wears the mask of biology, it gains a more contagious prowess. Moreover,

―programming by conditioning,‖ Brodie‘s notion, emphasizes the bad-marriage meme within the Fawley‘s descendants (Brodie, 2009, 128).

Brodie stresses the menace of memes arguing that, ―[t]he memes we‘re programmed with drive our behavior. That‘s why mind viruses are so scary and powerful‖ (196). The illusion of geneticizing the meme, where it is injected into the

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Zrekah blood and transmitted among generations, is the most dangerous infection strategy.

The text uses the theme of genetics as a camouflage covering societal memeticization. It collapses the memetic into the genetic to exonerate society. The physicality of the notion, ―the wrong breed for marriage,‖ guarantees the active transmission of the entitled meme with all its corollary co-memes. Arnold Bennett‘s

Anna of the Five Towns (1902) concludes with a sturdy justification for all its tragic events. The narrator validates that, ―[Anna] had sucked in with her mother's milk the profound truth that a woman's life is always a renunciation, greater or less‖

(Bennett, 1903, 297). The physical rationalization of the fictional incidents proves unlimited memetic transmittability. When blended with biology, memes become more infectious; consequently, more ―scary and powerful.‖ Biologizing ideology and geneticizing memes are two dangerous strategies of meme contagion.

Every time Sue escapes, her only way of getting out is a window. The

―window‖ symbolizes ―consciousness‖ (Olderr, 1986). Whenever Sue is cornered, she is ready to take every opening and opportunity of salvation. Sue fairly displays her case, at Jude's lodgings after escaping from the Training School, explaining that, ―[t]hey locked me up for being out with you; and it seemed so unjust that I couldn‘t bear it, so I got out of the window and escaped across the stream‖ (Hardy,

1999, 115). Her not-effaced-yet instinctual convictions refuse the cruel punishment.

Her rebellion is a coherent outcome of her private logic that sharply contradicts the meme-based public logic. Technically, and unfortunately for Sue, she jumps out of one memepool into another memepool. The tragedy lies in the fact that she cannot realize the transition. The window seems to be a cornerstone in Sue's story. She stands by windows, speaks through windows, and jumps out of windows. Through these various windows, Sue metaphorically moves from one memepool to another.

Hers is a drama of consciousness. The war is inside the head of Sue Bridehead.

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Zrekah The episode of Sue‘s presence in Jude's room, as a fugitive, is loaded with a mixture of memes and memeplexes. The landlady perceives Sue as a ―young gentleman‖ (116). Her perception stresses the meme that, just by changing dresses, a woman can be a man. Biology does not make men; suits make them. The landlady hosts the suit-meme which blinds her from recognizing the female in Sue.

The scene displays how the meme beats the gene. It demonstrates that ideology can marginalize biology. In the appearance-reality conflict, reality is submerged by meme-supported appearances. This point echoes Baudrillard‘s ―simulation‖ where the image becomes the origin. Sue's appearance disguises her reality and questions it. The text, not the texture, decides who they are.

Sue's second window escape bears a more insightful implication in its

―marital‖ context. Sue, the legal wife of Phillotson, throws herself out of the window of their matrimonial chamber to avoid his possible intimacies (179). The related episodes of Sue‘s physical window escape demonstrate her revolutionary and unconstrainable character. Nevertheless, these events are counteracted, once and for all, by her metaphorical escape into the conventional and memetic realm.

When she is cornered after the tragic infanticide event, Sue escapes through the memetic window. Unfortunately, she does not jump to a safe and secure ―land,‖ but to a muddy meme stream that re-besieges her and compellingly inhibits her. Her salvation seems to be her damnation. Her escape is her incarceration.

When the infanticide episode takes place, Sue is hypnotized. She considers genuinely, with all her attentiveness under pressure, that Little Father Time‘s killing her children is ―a judgment―the right slaying the wrong‖ (275). Her pronouncement is not the outcome of a private mental work. It signifies Sue's traumatized character due to the intrinsic memetic struggle. Sue poses as a victim of a hypnotizing ―illusion of invulnerability‖ (t‘Hart, 1991, 257). Society propagates 109

Zrekah its being a fortified sphere securing its entity and components, as long as they comply with its rules. Sue‘s retrogression to the collective mentality that rules society is also attributable to her ―belief in inherent morality of the group‖ (257).

She blindly reproduces the moral codes of her ideosphere seeing that social judgment is the only safe route to take.

Society considers the individual as the biggest threat. It is an armored entity that hides safely behind a complicated net of memetic traditions. The tension in

Hardy's novel is identified through the enigmatic memetic authority that defeats individual will. Sue's curious unconsciousness of gender dissolves under the memetic grinding power. She comes to act the ―proper woman‖ at the end by surrendering to her ―legal‖ husband. She moves from strong negation to ultimate affirmation, losing her ―assertiveness‖ by confining herself as a part of the ―women group.‖ It is not simply people picking up memes. It is, strongly, memes picking up people. Memes do the trapping; they corner people, ambush people, and render them non-people.

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Zrekah III. Conclusion:

“Individuality”: A Trojan Horse

“If you currently believe in any concepts or subcultures or dogmas … and you didn’t consciously choose to program yourself

with these memes, you are infected with a mind virus” (Brodie, 2009, 142).

The readers of Jude the Obscure keep wondering how Hardy's work works.

Hardy's last novel has taken almost eighty-years to be evenhandedly addressed. It has to wait until the rise of Memetics. This theory treats the enigma of that thing which inhibits characters, and tyrannically controls them, to the extent that they are no more their original selves.

Hardy's text provides a critical insight into the core of his contemporary society. Characters have the illusion that they can be outside the Victorian mores and the social ideology. They strongly believe that they can bypass the social dictates. Their tragedy arises from the fact that while they are outside, they are inside, and when they think they are fully free, they are fully fettered. This great paradox can be disentangled only from within Memetics. Jude hypothesizes that supposed self-consciousness is deceptive in any ideological context. Thus, running away from ideology definitely means falling into its trap. This is what Thomas

Albrecht emphasizes in his ―Donner à voir L‘Idéologie: Althusser and Aesthetic

Ideology.‖ He confirms that, ―[i]deology takes place in the very act of negating ideology‖ (Albrecht, 2004, 18). This notion parallels John Goode‘s definition of the obscurity theme in Jude. He underlines that, ―[t]he obscure life is the subject without a predicate, the margin that calls into question the page from which it is excluded‖ (Goode, 1988, 148).

An unstoppable typecasting is applied to everyone within a particular social sphere. The aim is to construct a solid ideosphere. This process is achieved through 111

Zrekah infection. Characters are reprogrammed with loads of memes that reshape them into membots and memoids. They are nothing but replicas of the ―perfect‖ citizen in the culture. The question is whether it is a real culture or a cell culture. As argued in the dissertation, it dynamically develops in the fashion of a cell culture; copies and replicas built upon copies and replicas of cultural units. It cultivates memes, meme hosts, membots, and memoids. By contrast, it excludes mutations and other independent entities. This occurs through metaphorical erasing and rewriting.

Originality is condensed through implicit infection strategies that result in consistent conformity. Consequently, the private and personal ―one‖ becomes a public and palimpsestic none. Originality is almost excluded in society. People are palimpsestic puppets.

When reading Jude, readers conclude that there is no immunity in the community. Almost every feeling of immunity is a fake mirage. It is a camouflage that facilitates meme contagion. The stronger the illusion of immunity is, the easier the memetic infection is. Readers encounter characters living the fantasy of being liberal, novel, innovative, and revolutionary. Being in opposition to their ideosphere, the protagonists suggest the theme of an ideal-real duel. However, this is only a deviation from the more essential subject of meme contagion which contributes to the production of the community of one mind.

The revolutionary characteristics are limited liberties allowed by society itself.

They are the material manifestations of Marcuse‘s ―repressive desublimation.‖ This technique is manipulated by the social forces to control nonconforming characters.

Individuality and originality are illusive baits. Transgressing boundaries is prohibited and impossible. Characters get the illusion that they can transcend conventions. Practically, this does not take place concerning fundamental issues. It comprises marginal points that do not threaten social stability. They live the myth 112

Zrekah of being rebels which is only a trap that provides the perfect ground for unnoticed memetic propagation. The concluding surrender proves that these characters are free of liberty. The more they feel free, the more they are freedom-free.

Throughout its history, the term ―individual‖ adopted a variety of meanings and connotations. Raymond Williams touches upon the origin of the meaning of

―individual‖ and its development in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and

Society (1976). From ―indivisible‖ to ―distinction from others,‖ where, ―[t]he development of the modern meaning from the original meaning is a record in language of an extraordinary social and political history‖ (Williams, 1976, 161). In the memetic discourse, the term ―individual‖ is a reference to none of these conceptions. In Jude, characters De-velop from ―individuals‖ into vehicles of the

Victorian memes that map their reality. Individuality is only a dazzling and well- built Trojan horse. When exploring its depth, one discovers that it is stacked with hidden units that contradict its positive exterior. Characters are reduced by memeticization from divisible individuals into indivisible and invisible vehicles of the meme; from men and women into mindless membots.

In the language of Raymond Williams, ―indivisible‖ is meant to point out, positively, the fact that a person cannot be separated from society: all are united. In

Hardy's fiction, ―indivisible‖ has become an ironic, catastrophic, Rhadamanthine concept. No wonder, Jude and Sue feel the urge to be integrated within their social milieu against which they keep resisting. Ironically, from society‘s perspective, these characters only get identities when they lose them forever. They become

―subjects,‖ in the language of Althusser, when they are fully subjected.

Society is an abusive entity. Its function is to inflict radical transformations on characters so that they are socially fit. They fit when they are unfit. Otherwise, they

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Zrekah will be called misfits. It aims at uprooting individuality to maintain social harmony.

Roger Webster provides a powerful declaration concerning the discussed ideas. He asserts that, ―the kinds of knowledge legitimated and naturalized‖ fall ―under the category of ‗common sense‘‖ whose ―truthfulness requires no justification‖

(Webster, 1990, 61). The communal internalization of particular memes develops into a state of innateness. The socially canonized memes turn into inherent aspects and beliefs within peoples‘ consciousness. In this way, their reproduction is unconscious and inevitable. Membots reproduce their own memeticization.

To purge society of potential contrary memes, scapegoating is the only method. Jude and Sue are tragic scapegoats. They are sacrificed to preserve and assert the stability of the dominant social order. They are scapegoats in the sense that ―they are blamed or punished not merely for the ‗sins‘ of others … but for tensions, conflicts, and difficulties of all kinds‖ (Girard, 1987, 74). These protagonists pay the price of society‘s eternal conflict with the individual. They are the victims of an everlasting clash. After all, it is as many theorists and researchers put it, ―[n]othing can escape from a black hole, not even light‖ (Mambrol, 2017).

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الجوهىرٌت العربٍت السىرٌت

جاهعت تشرٌن

كلٍت اَداب والعلىم اإلنسانٍت

قسن اللغت اإلنكلٍسٌت

تىهاش هاردي: هن رهضاء الجٍناث إلى نار الوٍواث رسالت هعدّة لنٍل درجت الواجستٍر فً اَداب

إعداد الطالبت: روعه زرٌقه

بإشراف: د. أحود العٍسى

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